Fertility: S01 E22 – Age and Infertility – Dr. Scott Whitten

Thank you for joining us again for an educational video my name is Dr. Scott Whitten from Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine and today I’m going to talk to you about how age impacts one’s fertility. Now I’m going to talk mostly about women because that seems to have the greatest impact on their reproductive status compared to men but I’ll talk about men a little bit too. For women they’re good they’re born with all the eggs are going to have and they lose eggs throughout the reproductive years until they end up in menopause which is when there is no more eggs in the ovaries on average in this country it happens about age 51 but they’re over just doesn’t work great until 51 and then shuts off the ovary works pretty good until about age 34 for most women and then it starts to decline in the way that it’s working and then when it’s declining over referring to is a decline in one’s fertility potential so success rates and getting pregnant start to go down chances of miscarriage start to go up at that same time frame and the chance of a chromosomal abnormality within those eggs that are produced starts to go up too samples like down syndrome is the classic example for that. Now when we start to see  women above age 35 we start to get more aggressive with their treatment because we know we don’t have as much time in the more time that goes on the more difficult it becomes so therefore that age group is where you hear woman’s biological clock is ticking it’s really the amount of time going on is going to make it more and more difficult for us. So if patients are getting pregnant with a certain type of treatment plan then we’re encouraging them to move forward with other treatments that are more aggressive that you can get higher success rates and so we might progressed through inseminations to in vitro fertilization something like that now there are patients where they run out of eggs or they find that the egg quality that they have is declined to such a degree that you can’t find any good eggs and good embryos for them to create their family and so in those cases there still options for those patients we utilize egg donation in some cases where were using eggs from somebody in their twenties because we don’t have any good eggs left we can still get our pregnancies from those now the age of the woman when she’s carrying is also important seems like recently we’ve been approached by a lot of patients that are older that want to carry a pregnancy and obviously they know that their eggs aren’t good anymore but they’re using embryos from another source egg donation embryo donation something like that and so if you’re in good health and your uterus is healthy then it is possible to carry a pregnancy even when you run out of eggs long as you have a uterus intact and we make sure that it seems safe to carry a pregnancy. There are probably are limits there as to how old should a patient be when they get pregnant and we put patients through a lot of different testing to try to ensure that they’re going to be safe during a pregnancy such as treadmill stress test for we put you on a treadmill make you run if there’s your heart is it able to keep up with that demand or else it will do things like have you see a high risk pregnancy doctor to make sure that they go through the risk of pregnancy on a woman when she’s older such as problems with blood pressure disorders growth restriction of the baby rest with hormone therapy all of that needs to be covered in great to tail so that we can make sure that it’s safe for a woman when you talk about how does age impact of males reproduction. Well men tend to produce sperm the majority of their life in most cases however the quality of that sperm does decline with time and there are certain age cutoff should have been chosen where we think maybe it’s more significant after a certain age the age that I go by his age 50 and older where we start to see some significant changes in the sperm that could then impact ones reproductive outcomes for example there might be more abnormalities in some of the sperm related to chromosomes such as sex chromosome disorders like Turner syndrome or Klinefelter syndrome we do see that but it’s only a slight increase in those risks so most of the time the guys aren’t going to change the source of sperm because of the risk that they hear about others they might feel like it’s significant but then I consider using it as a sperm donor but that’s pretty rare. So age is certainly important and certainly if you are considering getting pregnant and you’re worried about how age is going to impact your overall success you should talk to a specialist I would encourage you to do so thanks for listening tonight take care.