The big news item yesterday was the announcement that Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University and his colleagues produced embryonic stem cells from a human clone they produced. Their study, Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, was published in Cell. How they made a [...]

Recently, I received this question from a blog reader, ” I want to ask you about testicular stem cell transplantation– is it true or hoax?”. The short answer is, “No, it is not a hoax, but it is not a clinical treatment yet either”.  I found this review article, “Restoring Fertility in Sterile Childhood Cancer [...]

IVF practitioners have long recognized that extremely high estrogen levels from ovarian stimulation cycles can result in a syndrome called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome or (OHSS) which, if severe, can cause serious complications. Rarely, OHSS has caused patient deaths. In these high E2 cycles, the resulting embryos are often frozen and transferred in a later cycle [...]

Selecting the best sperm for ICSI is not a big deal if most of the sperm are normal.  Where it becomes more tricky is when you are hard pressed to find a normal appearing sperm in the sample. Some defects like sperm with two heads, huge heads, two tails, kinked tails are easy to detect [...]

Poor DNA repair may be the key to both cancer and egg aging, according to a new study.  “I think we have found a general theory of reproductive aging,” said Kutluk Oktay, a fertility specialist at New York Medical College and co-author of  “Impairment of BRCA1-Related DNA Double-Strand Break Repair Leads to Ovarian Aging in [...]

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when you want to understand the microscopic world of embryology. The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) recently published the Atlas of Human Oocytes and Embryos and have made it available for free on-line in either HTML or PDF form. Click on the [...]

When we think of infertility, we immediately think about the problem of not being able to get pregnant. But getting pregnant is not the same as having a child. The other end of the sharp stick in the eye that is infertility is the problem of getting pregnant- sometimes easily- but not being able to [...]

What characteristics  do you want in your sperm donor? Blue eyes? Brown hair? Would you like a six-foot two medical student who loves to play the saxophone or a five foot seven blonde tennis player? Or perhaps you’d like to find a sperm donor whose characteristics are a good match for your husband? Being able [...]

Andrologists performing semen analysis sometimes encounter  patients with no sperm in their ejaculate. There can be many reasons for “shooting blanks” ; the sperm factory could be closed (spermatogenesis failure) or the plumbing could be blocked (previous scarring from infection or a vasectomy) or the plumbing could actually be missing. The tubing that connects each [...]

Before we start down the road to IVF, is there a way to determine the probability that IVF treatments will work for us? Is there a way to predict our risk of multiples when we are being asked to decide between transferring one or two…or even three embryos? I failed my first IVF, what are [...]