Fertility: S01 E25 – Preimplantation Genetic Screening – Dr. Foulk

Hello this is Dr. Russell Foulk at the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine and today’s subject is an exciting one it’s about preimplantation genetic screening or another name for it is preimplantation genetic diagnosis. I’m a lot of people have heard about this it’s it’s a new and upcoming and very effective treatment that’s been around now for about 5 to 10 years so let me explain to you what exactly it is. It’s actually a subdivision of in vitro fertilization remember that in vitro fertilization is where you take an egg you take a sperm and outside the body put them together to create the embryo then you take the healthy embryo put it back into the uterus so that’s IVF that’s been around for over 40 years now and has made over a million babies in the world on what’s happened over the last 10 years though is we wanted to learn more about the embryos to select the best one to put in if you put in a bunch of embryos then you might end up a triplets or quadruplets which happened a lot 15 20 30 years ago. And that’s unacceptable its too risky of a pregnancy so a lot of researchers have been looking at ways to find the very best embryo to put in and that involves looking at the genetics of that embryo. So the process involves creating the embryo and instead of putting it in we biopsy about 3 to 5 cells from one of the walls of the embryo and then freeze the embryo and test the cells when you test them you can actually look at the genetics and see are they normal is that a Down syndrome embryo or is it an embryo that has extra chromosomes that would result in a miscarriage or in one that would not never implant. By doing so you can select out those embryos that are nonviable pick the very best embryo to put in and enhance the chance of a success with that one embryo what it’s done to our field into our patients is instead of putting in two and three and embryos which is what we used to do back 10-20 years ago now we can select the very best embryo to put in and maximize the chance of that everyone plant nowadays the implantation rate which is the ability for that  embryo to grab onto the uterus is approximating 65 to 70% for one embryo that means if you put one embryo in with IVF. You can get a pregnancy rate of around 70% that’s something that we used to help for 10 years ago putting in 3 embryos. So you can see how much it’s evolved and improved our outcomes another area of preimplantation genetic screening that we are doing is to look at genetic disease that’s the PGD I mentioned earlier and in that situation what you’re looking at is not just a general genetics but actually specific genes that could be abnormal for example there could be a couple that have cystic fibrosis in their genes in the sperm of the egg and when they come together it can cause the baby to be unhealthy and have serious complications in their pregnancy and in their life through there after so it PGD does is it biopsies the embryo the same but now we look for that specific gene and avoid transferring that embryo since it would result in an unhealthy baby same concept as more specific in terms of finding the very best embryo to put in the great news about PGS and PGD is that now we’re increasing our success rates extremely high and minimizing the risks minimizing the risk of triplets twins event so we get the very best and healthiest baby for the creation of our families so if you have any questions about PGS IVF for PGD feel free to call our office at the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine will be happy to help you.