Fertility: S01 E10 – Controlled Ovarian Stimulation – Dr. Scott Whitten

Thank you for joining me today for today’s video clip which is all about controlled ovarian stimulation. I’m Dr. Scott Whitten with the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine. Controlled ovarian stimulation refers to the act of stimulating the ovaries to produce an egg to ovulate in the attempts at getting pregnant and there’s different there’s different goals or objectives when you’re trying to stimulate the ovaries there’s a concept called ovulation induction which is really when a woman doesn’t ovulate on her own you’re trying to induce ovulation to occur so your goal really is only one to two eggs to grow in that type of a treatment cycle as opposed to what’s called controlled ovarian stimulation or hyperstimulation which is when a woman’s already ovulating and releasing an egg each month or trying to super ovulate her which means tempting to get more eggs to grow in a given cycle. And we do this in different types of treatments including in vitro fertilization as one type of stimulation but then we also do it and other cycle where patients can use intercourse or insemination in order to get pregnant. There’s different medications that we would use for patients to induce ovulation for them there’s a couple of oral medications one of them is called Clomiphene Citrate the other one is called Femara or Letrozole. Femara is used off-label which means it wasn’t intended to be used for what we use it for however that’s what we use it for we’ve been using it for probably the last couple of decades with great success so we use those two different oral medications and then we also use injectable medications. So it really depends upon what’s the goal and then how much medication does a patient need in order to achieve that goal. Now there are risks when you take these medications the risk one risk would be that the medication doesn’t work and you don’t grow an egg that month you also could actually over-stimulate it’s called hyperstimulation we actually make too many eggs and therefore would be too dangerous to proceed these things all can be tailored by monitoring a patient cycle so we keep track of how they respond to medications with ultrasound so it typically in our office for monitoring patients every cycle every month for the response to the medications and hopefully that we’re getting the right response to one they get the success that they want. Success rates are really depend upon multiple factors and therefore I can’t quote an actual success rate for just insemination unless you know other details about a couple such as what is the females age, what are their underlying infertility factors, are their tubes open, do they have endometriosis or other conditions. So once you know those factors then you can talk about what would you expect for the success rate when you stimulate a woman’s ovaries to produce eggs but it ranges anywhere from about 10 to 20% per month. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this information, if you have more questions about it please feel free to contact our office and our professionals at NCRM. Have a nice day.