Fertility tests currently on offer neither count the number of eggs remaining nor assess their quality. Instead, they sample what are hoped to be relevant hormones
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe main causes of fertility’s reduction with advancing years are declines in the number and quality of the eggs in a woman’s ovaries. Unlike men, whothroughout their post-pubertal lives, albeit in ever-decreasing quantities, all of a woman’s potential eggs develop while she is still a fetus. A newborn girl has over 1m of them. By puberty, she is left with about 400,000.
Between 2008 and 2016 Dr Steiner and her colleagues ran the Time to Conceive study. Its purpose was to determine whether hormone levels could indeed assess a woman’s fertility, independent of her age. The team found then that those levels had no value in predicting pregnancy in the year subsequent to testing. Now, in a follow up to the original investigation, just published in, Dr Steiner has shown that they have no longer-term predictive power, either.
But perhaps, Dr Steiner subsequently speculated, that window was too narrow. In 2020 she therefore got back in touch with the original participants for a follow-up. She asked them if they would fill out a questionnaire about how many children they had had, how long it had taken to get pregnant and whether they had been diagnosed with infertility.
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