Fertility: S01 E11 – What is IUI? – Dr. Whitten

I’m Dr. Scott Whitten from the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine here in Reno and I want to talk to about IUI’s it’s also known as artificial insemination or just insemination. An intrauterine insemination refers to the process of placing sperm up into the uterus which is allowing sperm to get closer to where an egg is released from the ovary and picked up within the fallopian tube there’s different reasons why we do inseminations for patients one of the most common reasons is if it’s a malefactor, malefactor implying that sperm numbers are low and if sperm numbers are low then we want to get those sperm a big boost and head start to where they need to go ultimately hopefully they’ll get to their final destination which is the egg up in the tubes. There’s other reasons that what will do IUI’s for patients sometimes patients have a cervical in compatibility with the sperm and therefore we need to bypass it so we’ll do IUI’s for that reason sometimes patients have endometriosis and they need more sperm delivered to the tubes and sometimes patients female patients at mine don’t have a partner and so they use sperm that’s donated from a sperm bank in order to achieve a goal of a pregnancy. The process in which we do insemination in the office is really having to be well-timed to when an ovulation occurs so ovulation from other videos you’ll understand comes from the release of the egg from the ovary. Right before that is when you want the sperm present available to fertilize that egg so that’s how we time it so what time it is there with natural cycles and checking ovulation predictor kits or you might even time at with giving a patient an injection of HCG to release the egg but once that egg is getting ready to release that’s when we would perform the insemination so way that happens is we obtain a sperm sample and then it is processed in our laboratory a raw sperm sample cannot be placed up into the uterus by itself otherwise it would cause a lot of inflammation and perhaps even infection. So what we do is we washed that sample we rinse out everything that comes from the prostate gland the seminal vesicles the things that would be harmful to the uterus and we leave just the sperm in a very very small volume of media fluid and then the sperm is loaded into a small little syringe and then into it what we call an insemination catheter and there’s all kinds of different catheters that we use but the most common one that I use in my office is this type here called an insemi-form and essentially what happens is when the woman is ready to be inseminated we place a speculum to visualize their cervix and then this would be the cervix down here the uterus this is the insemination catheter its place right up here into the uterus and then we would let the sperm sample go. Remove this take the speculum out inseminations finished sit for about 5 minutes in the office and then they’re discharged to home with instructions. After that we want to check the pregnancy test for the patient in 2 weeks and hopefully it’s been successful. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s tip with inseminations if you have questions please feel free to contact our office.