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Reproductive Health Blog

How do infertility treatments work and how effective are they?

How do infertility treatments work

Infertility treatments are science stepping in when nature is unable to do the job. All infertility treatments involve bringing the husband’s sperm and the wife’s egg together.  
This can take place in her womb or in a laboratory, and there are differing levels of complexity, care and techniques needed. Here is a quick introduction to the three most common infertility treatments that people encounter.

Intrauterine Insemination (IUI)

IUI is usually the first line of treatment in most infertility cases. In this treatment, the wife is given hormones to help her ovulate (discharge mature eggs from the ovaries) at the right time, while the husband’s semen is collected, washed (motile sperms separated from the seminal fluid) and the sperms are then introduced into the wife’s uterus using a special sterile tube. It has between a 10 and 15% chance of success – even at a centre as good as Nova.

In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF)

In IVF, after hormone treatment and an ultrasound to check ovulation, the woman’s egg is picked up and allowed to mingle with her husband’s sperms in a glass dish in the lab, and one of the sperms will fertilise it. This is the most common method of infertility treatment, with success rates as high as 40-50% per cycle.

Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI)

Unlike IVF, in this infertility treatment, a single sperm is taken into a hollow glass needle and injected directly into the egg for fertilisation. Naturally this requires much higher technology, training and environment. ICSI is recommended in severe male infertility cases, since only the best and the healthiest sperm is used for fertilisation.

At Nova IVF Fertility Clinic in Delhi, Lajpat Nagar where infertility treatment is carried out ethically, the success rate for IVF/ICSI is about 50%. By the way, if anyone “guarantees” a baby, be very wary. The top clinics in the WORLD take four cycles at least to hit a 90% success rate!  
Each of these infertility treatments is advised appropriately depending on the age and the fertility potential of the couple. But there is one common thing: the more care the clinic takes – in diagnosis, tests, medication, retrieval, fertilisation, monitoring, counselling and support – the better your chances of becoming pregnant.

And Nova IVF Fertility goes to extraordinary lengths:

  • We retrieve eggs in a specialised environment, which many clinics don’t offer.
  • We move the eggs to a super safe laboratory which conforms to class 10,000 clean room standards, which most clinics in India do not have.
  • We have a team of embryologists at every centre, so there is no time lost between retrieval and fertilisation. Many clinics typically don’t have dedicated, in-house teams. Instead several unconnected clinics share embryologists, which means that fertilisation frequently happens at a time convenient to the clinic, not the time that is right for you.
  • And the embryos are grown in specialised incubators that protect embryos and help them be healthy.

Each of these steps we take is to maximise your chances of pregnancy. That is how we’ve been able to reach 35,000* (as on Dec 2020) IVF pregnancies, making Nova IVF Fertility India’s No. 1 fertility chain.

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