Note-Worthy News (to Me Anyway!)

Most of you know that we conceived Toby through IVF, actually on our third round of IVF, we conceived him. From our first IVF cycle, we were able to freeze one embryo and also from the third cycle we froze another embryo. Thus, we have two frozen embryos that one day, quite a ways down the road, we plan on going through one "frozen cycle", using them both and seeing what happens.

I don't do a very good job at keeping up with the news, James, on the other hand, does, so every once in a while he emails me a news article that he thinks I might want to read. He does this even when we are living in the same house together and I think it's quite nice. Well, anyway, yesterday he sent me this article:

Frozen Embryos Better than Fresh, Study Shows
By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent, in Barcelona

Using frozen instead of fresh embryos produces healthier babies, a new study shows.

Infants born from embryos which were frozen and then thawed before being implanted into a woman had a higher birth weight and were less likely to suffer abnormalities.

Fewer of the children were also twins or triplets. Multiple births are known to increase the risk of complications as well as the danger to the mother.

More than 1,200 children born between 1995 and 2006 after frozen embryo replacement (FER) were studied and compared to 17,857 children born from "fresh" embryos.

Freezing embryos allows couples to have several In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment cycles from the same egg collection, reducing the number of times that the ovaries are stimulated. The eggs are placed in the womb three to five days after ovulation in exactly the same way as fresh embryos.

Multiple births accounted for 27.3 per cent of children born from fresh embryos, compared with 14.2 per cent when frozen embryos were used. Babies from frozen embryos were on average 200 grams heavier on birth than those from fresh embryos, the findings presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) in Barcelona. The proportion of low birth weight and pre-term FER children was significantly lower.

Dr Anja Pinborg, from the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet, who led the study, said: "Most encouragingly, we found no increased risk of congenital malformations in the FER group; the rate in this group was 7.1 per cent compared to 8.8 per cent where fresh embryos had been used. "We think the reason for the differences is probably positive selection of the embryos for frozen embryo replacement.

"Only the very top quality embryos survive the freezing and thawing process.

"And you only get pregnancies in patients with lots of good embryos to freeze."

Until later,

Emily