The staff at Gundersen Lutheran Fertility Center would like to welcome you to our IVF program under new leadership.
Dr. Kathy Trumbull is our medical director and is accompanied by
Joy Peterson, who is our embryology laboratory director. Many things have changed since the doors to the IVF program were last open. We offer a larger spectrum of services that were never before available to the Tri-state Region, including intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), pre-implantation genetics diagnosis (PGD) and cryopreservation of sperm and embryos.
We would like to emphasize that previous publications of success rates of Gundersen Lutheran Fertility Center are not an accurate portrayal of what our current team has accomplished.
Gundersen Lutheran Fertility Center 2009 ongoing pregnancy rates:
A comparison of clinic success rates may not be meaningful because patient medical characteristics and treatment approaches vary from clinic to clinic.
2008 Live Birth Rates
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requires that all United States programs that perform Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) procedures provide their IVF outcome report on an annual basis. Because live birth rates are not available until the end of the following year - a baby conceived through IVF in December 2008 will not be born until at least September 2009 – the CDC does not require reports to be submitted until the end of that year. Furthermore, it typically takes the CDC a year to compile, verify, and release the data to the public, which means that ours will not be available publicly until the end of 2010.
Here is a copy of our data report for the CDC for the year 2008.
A comparison of clinic success rates may not be meaningful because patient medical characteristics and treatment approaches vary from clinic to clinic.
If you would like to view the CDCs most recently published national statistics, please visit the CDC Web site.
What does all of this mean?
Many programs report their statistics in different ways, and there are often several definitions for a specific term, so not all programs’ success rates can be compared equally. We have tried to present our rates as close to how the CDC presents them.
Age groups are split up the same way that the CDC divides them because as women age, their chance of pregnancy typically decreases. In order to present a program’s outcome results in a format that is fair, it is best to divide the cycles according to age.
The number of cycles means the number of women that started taking medications to stimulate their ovaries to produce eggs for an IVF cycle.
Clinical pregnancies, by the CDC’s criteria, are defined by the presence of a fetal heartbeat on ultrasound. Therefore, the percentage of cycles resulting in clinical pregnancies is the number of patients that had a fetal heartbeat detected in the uterus divided by the total number of patients that started medications to stimulate the production of eggs.
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Unfortunately, not all pregnancies are carried to term and are therefore taken out of the percentages to give the ongoing pregnancy rate. When you look at similar data presented by the CDC, this is called the live birth rate. We cannot give you our statistics on live births yet because many of the patients we worked with in 2009 are still pregnant. By using the ongoing pregnancy rate, we can tell you the percentage of our patients that have delivered or are progressing well in their pregnancy.
The CDC breaks this category down further to look at live birth rates by cycle start, egg retrieval and embryo transfer. What this shows is that not all patients who start a cycle make it to egg retrieval and not all patients who make it to an egg retrieval have an embryo transfer.
- The percentage of cycles resulting in ongoing pregnancies tells you how many women have an ongoing pregnancy out of all the women that started medications, even if they didn’t make it to an egg retrieval or an embryo transfer.
- The number of egg retrievals is often less than the number of cycles that were started because some cycles are cancelled before the egg retrieval. Cycles may be cancelled for many reasons — sometimes medical and sometimes personal. As a result, the percentage of retrievals resulting in ongoing pregnancies is usually higher than the pregnancy rate per cycle.
- The number of embryo transfers is often less than the number of retrievals because not all patients have eggs that fertilize or embryos that grow and are transferred. Because of this, the percentage of transfers resulting in ongoing pregnancies is typically higher than that for retrievals.
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The percentage of transfers resulting in singleton ongoing pregnancies tells how many women that had an embryo transfer resulted in a pregnancy with a single baby, regardless of the number of embryos transferred. The CDC feels that this is an important statistic because singleton pregnancies are at a much lower risk for poor outcomes than multiples.
The percentage of cancellations is the percent of patients that start medications who don’t make it to an egg retrieval. Cycles can be cancelled for a variety of reasons, such as:
- The patient’s ovaries don’t respond well to the stimulation medications so very few, if any, eggs are produced.
- The patient’s ovaries over-respond to the medications, a condition known as ovarian hyperstimulation, which can lead to additional medical complications.
- The patient’s uterine lining doesn’t develop enough to support a pregnancy.
- Sometimes patients drop out because of personal reasons or due to an illness or other medical issue.
The average numbers of embryos transferred is a very important number when you are evaluating programs. The goal of every IVF program should be to get a good singleton pregnancy rate by transferring fewer embryos. Although many of our patients would be happy with a twin pregnancy, it is not considered the optimal outcome by the medical community. SART (Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology) and ASRM (American Society of Reproductive Medicine) have established guidelines for IVF programs to adhere to regarding the number of embryos to transfer based on many factors, such as: the age of the patient, the stage of the embryo at transfer and previous IVF failures.
The percentage of clinical pregnancies with twins or triplets is the number of patients that had more than one heartbeat on their first ultrasound. Furthermore, the percentage of ongoing pregnancies having multiple infants is the number of patients that have a pregnancy with more than one fetus or have more than one child.
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