Next Valentine’s Day, as your dearly beloved runs into the local drugstore for that last-minute Valentine’s Day card and box of chocolates, he will also have the chance to pick up an at home sperm count test called SpermCheck. I used to joke that we take all the “fun” out of conception in the IVF [...]

Unexplained infertility is a frustrating diagnosis. The usual diagnostic work up has no “AHA!!”  moment and clear treatment plan. In spite of no obvious problems, there’s still no pregnancy month after month. Scientist Dr Megan Lloyd and her team announced the discovery of an antibody against the glycoprotein zona pellucida 3 (ZP3) which induces sterility [...]

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has a Ethics Committee which issues recommendations regarding various ART medical practices. Most recently, they published “Disclosure of medical errors involving gametes and embryos”  If this link doesn’t work, you can download a PDF copy for yourself directly from www.asrm.org. In this article, the Ethics Committee generally advocates for [...]

One of my readers had some questions about egg vacuoles in IVF so I thought I’d touch on this topic today.  Vacuoles look like roundish areas in the egg. They can be large or small, many or few. Sometimes they can be mistaken for pronuclei but unlike pronuclei, vacuoles are clear inside, and don’t have [...]

I get a recurring question from my readers, sometimes posed in the comments section and sometimes via email. Understandably, patients want a checklist of points to review for good clinics and a checklist of points or warning signs for the bad clinics. Coming up with a “naughty and nice” list is not so simple because [...]

Recently one of my readers had a question that I think many patients who go through IVF may have. She wanted to understand what blastocyst grading means in terms of embryo quality and then, obviously the implications for her  chances of pregnancy. Her question was: ” I just had two expanded blastocysts transferred on day [...]

Ever wondered what your embryo was up to during the five days it spent in the IVF incubator? Well, here’s a beautiful time-lapse video of embryo development from pronuclear stage (when fertilization is determined) to the blastocyst stage (when the embryo is implantation-ready). One of my most popular posts is about the progression of embryo [...]

One of my readers asked me my opinion of the sperm DNA fragmentation index or DFI. The value of any clinical test depends on a number of factors. Is the test relatively easy to perform or is it subject to exceptional end user skill and ideal test conditions? Some research lab tests don’t translate well [...]

Newsweek’s cover this week had an adorable baby with the headline, “You got your sperm where? How to get pregnant, fast, cheap -and in public“. Wow, talk about an eye grabber. In this article you meet a 40 year old virgin who calls himself a “donorsexual” and gives his sperm away (in a cup) to [...]

Most couples struggling with infertility are presented with the results of a semen analysis report at some point in their journey. The male partner produces a sample, usually by masturbation, either at home or at the clinic and the semen sample is analyzed under the microscope. Most people are familiar with sperm count, semen volume [...]