Researchers at Cardiff University have unveiled a DIY test to help women maximize their chances of motherhood.

The ‘fertility thermometer’ uses a woman’s answers to 22 questions about age, lifestyle and health to assess the state of her fertility.

Each answer is rated blue, yellow, orange or red, depending on how much it affects the odds of pregnancy, with red ratings being the most damaging.

The woman then tots up her score for each colour before reading advice on what she needs to do to optimise her chances of having a family.

The FertiSTAT test, which was unveiled at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s annual conference, was developed after more and more women delay motherhood until they are in their 30s or 40s.

In Britain, the average age for a woman to have her first child has risen from 24 to 30 since the early 1970s.

But fertility plummets with age, while the risk of pregnancy complications rises sharply.

Dr Jacky Boivin, who designed the test with colleague Laura Bunting, hopes the fertility thermometer will help women think about their fertility and take steps to optimise it.

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Here’s a study your hubby will be quoting for the next month.

While many clinics advise couples to have sex every other day in order to get pregnant, scientists have found that regular sex can significantly improve the quality of a man’s sperm.

Although the quantity of sperm declined by more than half, researchers insisted that levels stayed well within those considered necessary for fertility.

Dr David Greening, from Sydney IVF, in Wollongong, Australia, said: “Sperm don’t seem to like staying in warm testicles for too long. The advice might be to keep the rivers flowing.”

He added that his findings could also explain in part the problems that some couples have conceiving as they get older.

Dr Greening said that men were more likely to have sex daily when they were in their twenties than by the time they had reached their forties.

“Perhaps reproductively we are built to do it in our youth. We have been blaming women as we get older (for fertility problems) when perhaps there is also contribution from the male because we are not behaving as we should be (by having regular sex).”

Dr Allan Pacey, Senior Lecturer in Andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “There may be dangers if we apply this finding to all men uncritically and to all situations.

“For example, in cases where men have low sperm counts to start with, daily ejaculations may well reduce the sperm count still further and whilst sperm may be more healthy the reduced numbers could impede the chance of natural conception.

However, if such men are preparing for an assisted conception procedure, this may well not matter and their chances of success may be improved.”

Constance Marie introduces us to her miracle baby Luna in this weeks issue of People.

It took the actress more than three years – including three attempts using the fertility drug Clomid in combination with intrauterine insemination and two failed efforts at in vitro fertilization – before reaching her goal of becoming a mother.

“She’s the sweetest pie and a big sleeper,” says Marie, 43, of daughter Luna Marie, born Feb. 5 via C-section. “We waited so long for her, she can boss me around as much as she wants!”

The new mom talks candidly to the magazine about her experience.

“I was 38½ years old when we started trying to have a baby,” says Marie, whose fiancé is yoga coach Kent Katich, 45. “I thought it would be no problem, but the 3½ years it took us was the most difficult period of my life.”

After going the natural route for a year, Marie tried the fertility drug Clomid combined with intrauterine insemination before contemplating in vitro fertilization. During the process, she got pregnant two times but both pregnancies failed.

“For us, it was one step at a time down a long road of dealing with fertility issues,” she says about resorting to IVF.

A third attempt at IVF combined with acupuncture proved successful.

“After a while, my normal attitude was that it wasn’t going to work out,” she says. “When I finally got pregnant the third time [with Luna Marie], I didn’t quite believe it. After three years of peeing on little sticks, I skipped the home pregnancy tests and waited until I got to the doctor to do a blood test. Only then did I believe it!”

Now, Constance wants to share her experience in order to help other women.

“I’m very supportive of women getting to a place in life when it’s right for them to start a family,” she says. “It’s important for women to take their time to come into their own. I only want to say we might not have as much time as we think we have.”

PHOTOCREDIT:Alison Dyer VIA SOURCE

Harvard Researchers studying 18,000 women found those on a fertility diet were six times more likely to conceive.

Their research found that the fat in whole dairy products like milk and ice cream improve fertility.

Experts also advise would-be moms to stay away from trans fats, or at least limit consumption to no more than four grams a day.

Foods that increase fertility are:

• good proteins
• slow carbs, like vegetables, fruits and brown rice

Foods that decrease your chances of getting pregnant are:

• Fast carbs, which are found in white rice, white bread and white sugar
• red meat

Dr. Koren Barrett of the University of California says this is because

“higher insulin levels and higher glucose levels or sugar levels in our blood disrupt our hormones.”

The Dailymail has a great story about Yvonne Finlayson and husband Mark Ruston’s journey to have a baby. The couple struggled with infertility for years until they found the Sher Institute of Reproduction in Los Angeles.

The clinic, that had a good success rate with fertility treatment, suggested that Yvonne use Viagra to thicken her womb lining.

After trying many procedures, Yvonne and Mark, were willing to try anything, but they weren’t very hopeful that the treatment would work at all.

Ten days later, back in the UK, Mrs Finlayson discovered she was pregnant – with twins!

Doctors warned the couple that one of the twins was not likely to survive.

However, they both held on and were born at Wishaw General Hospital in Lanarkshire. Lewis weighed 6lb 1oz and Ava just 4lb 11oz.

Even though the couple had to sell their house to pay for the fertility treatment, which cost a staggering £23,000 in total, they say that it has been worth every penny to get their twins.

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As many as 20 test-tube babies were delivered through caesarean section at the private hospital.

The director of the hospital, Dr. S. Dhanabhagyam, did not wish to create a sensation around the feat, it was a ‘superstition’ that led to the birth of the babies.

She performed caesarean section on 12 mothers in the last stages of pregnancy to fulfil the wishes of the parents.

“All the mothers wanted their babies to be born on October 30 — an auspicious day in Tamil calendar,” Dr. Dhanabhagyam told TOI.

The day marks the start of Kandar sashti, or the six-day festival, for celebrating the Hindu god, Subrahmanya’s triumph over the demon, Sura Padman.

Of the 12 mothers, eight birthed twins.

For Dr. Dhanabhagyam, who has delivered over a 1,000 IVF babies in the past decade, it was a fulfilling moment to deliver 20 IVF babies on a single day. She performed 12 caesarean section operations nearly without a break between 5 am to 10 pm.

The mothers are between ages 35 and 51 and suffer either from lack of eggs, ovarian failure or defective fallopian tubes. All the eggs were fertilized through the now popular ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection) technique, in which the sperm is directly injected into each egg. With their babies snuggled in their arms, unmindful of the media glare, all the 12 mothers left the hospital on Tuesday.

It would have been much like an assembly line of moms waiting to give birth.

Related Articles:

• Unregulated Sperm Donations Causing Problems In Australia
• 59 Year-old Woman Preparing to Give Birth to Triplets
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• British Couple Abandons IVF Twins After They Are Delivered The ‘Wrong Sex’

The deseased widow Iris Kievernagel, had petitioned the court for the rights to conceive a child from her late husband’s frozen sperm.

Iris’s husband Joseph died in a helicopter crash July 13, 2005. He was responding to a burglary call when it went down near Lake Natoma, slamming into a hillside and rolling down a ravine.

According to the court’s opinion, issued Thursday, the Kievernagels were happily married for 10 years prior to the helicopter crash. The court noted, however, that Joseph Kievernagel “was opposed to having children, but agreed to the fertility procedures due to Iris’s strong desire for children.”

The couple had contracted with Northern California Fertility Medical Center to perform in vitro fertilization so that Iris Kievernagel could conceive.

Joseph Kievernagel also signed the center’s consent agreement that provided that the sperm was his sole property.

The agreement, according to court documents, also offered two options if Kievernagel were to die: donate the sperm to his wife or discard the sperm.

A box indicating the sperm should be discarded upon his death was checked and Joseph Kievernagel initialed it.

The Superior Court verdict was that Joseph Kievernagel’s intent was to have his frozen sperm discarded. His widow appealed, saying her late husband didn’t even read the sperm bank’s agreement and that he had intended to have a child with her.

But the state appeals court said “the material at issue is Joseph’s sperm, not a preembryo” and only Joseph has ownership.

This is a very sad situation. First she looses her husband and now she looses the fight to have his child. It probably would have been very comforting to her to know that her husband would live on in the form of a son or daughter. SOURCE

An Italian man is demanding £140,000 in compensation after claiming his wife’s constant nagging left him impotent.

Sergio Vinucci, from Parma, has produced medical evidence in court that backs up his claims that his wife’s nagging caused him so much stress that he has been left impotent.

He said: “All she ever does is complain. It is extremely stressful and it has left me unable to be a man. I want some compensation.”

Well, there it is ladies. If you want to have a baby – treat him good and reduce his stress. Is this a ploy??

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The radio host and daughter of Martha Stewart has spent the last year seeing fertility doctors and trying cutting-edge procedures to get pregnant.

Alexis, now 42, put off trying to have a baby at 36 because she was ‘it wasn’t a good time” and then she forgot about it.

Two years later it became a priority again, but now she is worried that “it is almost too late”.

“[We] get distracted because now we have jobs, and now we have other things to do. Medicine seems miraculous—you can do anything you want,” she says. “Movie stars have babies late. It seems all possible, but you don’t hear the stories of the people who can’t have a baby.”Now that Alexis is in her 40s, she says getting pregnant is difficult because her eggs are “dry and crusty.” To increase the number of eggs her body produces, Alexis says she takes an arsenal of drugs each month.

Her medical routine begins every month on the day after she gets her period. “I go to the doctor and test my blood,” she says. “They do an ultrasound. They look at my ovaries to make sure there are no cysts. They check the lining of my uterus, and then that night, I begin my medication.”

Every evening, Alexis says she gives herself two injections of fertility drugs. “Then, on about the 11th day, the doctor will say, ‘You’re ready. In two days we’re going to harvest your eggs,’” she says.

Doctors have tried the ICSI—intracytoplasmic sperm injection—method with some of Alexis’s viable eggs and sperm she got from a sperm bank. “ICSI is where they take the egg and they poke a hole in it,” she says. “They put the sperm in—they don’t just wait for it to fertilize, because your egg is hard and old and crusty. It doesn’t want to make a baby.”

Alexis says she’s had three egg implantations, but none of them have stuck. “Last month, I had no eggs that were viable, so I’m sort of back to square one at the moment,” she says.

Fertility treatments can be time-consuming and emotionally draining. To keep things in perspective, Alexis says she tries to think of them as part of a job. “If I get too emotional about it, I’ll be unhappy all the time or freaked out all the time,” she says. “So I look at it as sort of a chore. … Not about having a baby, but what I have to go through to get there.”

Martha has been helping with the cost of the procedures and giving moral support as well.

When Oprah asked if she would like a grandchild. Alexis responded “Desperately.”

She plans to continue with the treatments until doctors say that there is nothing more they can do.

No back up plan is in place.

“When I have to think about my other options, then I will do that. But at the moment, I can only think about this option.”

SOURCE:OPRAH.COM

Alexis Stewart, Martha Stewart’s daughter has been open about her desire to be a mom.

The 41-year-old daughter of Martha Stewart has been trying to get pregnant for two years – spending up to $27,000 a month in the last seven months alone to have a baby.

The divorced talk show host has wanted a baby since she was 37, but has been able to become pregnant.

“But when my mother got into trouble, I couldn’t think about it,” said Alexis, referring to the stock-deal scandal that sent the domestic diva to the slammer in 2004. “About two years ago, after all that was over, I got back on track.”

But getting on track came with a big price tag.

“I’m single now, but having my own kid is the most important thing in my life, so I am trying everything I can: fancy doctors, expensive drugs, high-tech procedures,” she said. “Most people can’t afford what I am doing, I am really lucky; I know that.”

Alexis, who said she was opting for an anonymous sperm donor, told the magazine the first place she went for treatment cost about $10,000 a month.

“When I didn’t respond to the drugs after three months, they basically said, ‘Don’t bother,’ and kept asking, ‘Why don’t you use a donor egg?’ Finally, I said, ‘You’re fired.’ ”

Since December, Alexis, now like her mom a Sirius Satellite Radio talk-show host, has been going to the New York Fertility Institute in Manhattan, where drugs cost $6,000 – and the doctors and in vitro fertilization procedures about $20,000 to $27,000 a month.

“They give me, like, eight times as many drugs than the other place did to stimulate egg production, then check me every two to four days,” she said.

She said once a month she’ll inject herself with a drug that causes her to ovulate in 36 hours.

“Just before the 36 hours are up, I go to the doctor’s office and they put me under anesthesia and use an 18-inch needle to remove about 10 eggs,” she said. “Then, I go home to my apartment in TriBeCa, change and get ready for my Sirius Radio show, ‘Whatever.’ ”

The doctor, meanwhile, fertilizes the eggs, using a technique called intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, which involves poking a hole in each egg and shoving a sperm in to create an embryo, she said.

“I’m using an anonymous donor, but not from a genius bank,” she said. “Those are creepy.”

After testing the embryos for Down syndrome and other anomalies, the doctor will try to transfer the healthy ones, she said.

“I’ve had two transfers,” she said. “They haven’t stuck . . . If there are no healthies, I try to let it go immediately, because you can go crazy. Crazy.”

“I’m trying to build up a supply of healthy embryos because, ideally, I’d love to have two kids,” she said.

Alexis divorced attorney John Cuti in 2004, explaining they were “completely ambivalent about kids.”

“Now, I no longer have the luxury of having doubts,” she said. “A child is your legacy. What better thing can you do in life than put a really good person in the world who’s going to make it a better place?

“And my mom’s just desperate. She has wanted grandchildren forever. Forever! She’s always like, ‘For my birthday, I would like you to be pregnant.’ And I’m like, ‘Me, too!’ “

SOURCE:NYPOST

The North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, was busy last month delivering 7 sets of triplets, a record for the facility that had just 11 in all of last year.

At a news conference Tuesday at the hospital, three pairs of new triplet parents looked tired, but they glowed as they described their experiences.

“We weren’t expecting triplets; it wasn’t planned,” said Ross Rinaldi, 37, of Whitestone, who sings Irish songs to his son, John, and two daughters, Noreen and Patricia. “When I found out I was getting triplets, I knew I needed a bigger home.”

At least one set of triplets born at the hospital was conceived without the use of fertility drugs, but most of the parents had used those treatments, doctors said.

Stacie Sakellis, 35, of Flushing, said she and her husband, Demetrios, 33, had been trying to conceive for more than two years when, with the help of fertility treatment, she became pregnant with triplets.

“It was the biggest shock when the doctor was doing the sonogram,” she said, laughing. “First he saw one, then he saw two, then he saw three. I told him to stop. I didn’t think I could take it anymore.”

Like most triplets, all seven sets were born prematurely and could face health problems, said Dr. Michelle Smith-Levitin, director of the hospital’s high-risk pregnancy center.

So far, none of the babies or their mothers have encountered serious health setbacks, and only one set of triplets has left the hospital. Three more babies, not all from the same set, were scheduled to leave yesterday.

Rates of triplet births have risen nationally since 1980 by as much as 500 percent, according to Smith-Levitin, in part because of the use of fertility drugs. But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2004, the last year data were available, there was a 5 percent drop in triplet births to 176.9 per 100,000 live births, down from 187.4 the year before. And, despite modern health advancements, triplet pregnancies and births remain risky.

Triplets, like all premature babies, are prone to infection, as well as breathing and feeding problems, said Dr. Richard Schanler, chief of neonatology at the hospital. And more demand is placed on the mother, who must produce three times the normal amount of milk if the mother breast feeds.

The seven triplet births posed challenges for the hospital. Schanler said three delivery teams, each consisting of a doctor, a nurse and a respiratory therapist, were on hand for the birth of each triplet set. Parents seek out North Shore because of its reputation as a hospital that performs high-risk births, Schanler said.

As the hospital stays near an end for some babies, seven sets of parents prepared to bring their new triplets home.

Most said they have their nurseries ready, their triplet strollers waiting and supplies stockpiled.

Michele and Patrick Barbo of Greenlawn say they have loaded up on diapers as they wait for their babies.

“We’re hoping that in the next two weeks, they’ll come home,” said Michele Barbo, 33, who gave birth on June 11.

Do you remember when seeing a set of twins, triplets or quads was a rarity? Those days are long gone…

It was funny to watch the video interviews with the parents when they said how ’shocked’ they were that there were so many babies in there. They knew that there was a chance that multiples could occur during their fertility treatments, but didn’t believe that it could happen to them.

Does no one read the papers anymore?? Last year alone there were around 7,000 sets of triplets born in the U.S., with only approximately 2,100 of them occurring naturally.

That is a lot of parents who thought that it could only happen to someone else…

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The first test-tube baby created from an egg matured in the laboratory and then frozen has been born in Canada, in a breakthrough offering hope to women with cancer and others unsuited to normal IVF treatment.

The baby is doing well and another three women are pregnant by the same method, researchers told a medical meeting in Lyon, France, on Monday.

Conventional in vitro fertilization (IVF) involves using high doses of expensive hormone drugs to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple mature eggs.

But some women seeking to preserve their child-bearing capacity may not have enough time to undergo ovarian stimulation or may have a condition that makes it dangerous, such as hormone-sensitive breast cancer.

For these patients, ripening eggs in the lab — so-called in vitro maturation (IVM) — makes sense. Until now, however, scientists have never frozen, thawed and then fertilized a lab-matured egg. This multi-step process increases significantly the flexibility of fertility treatment.

“We have demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to do this and, so far, we have achieved four successful pregnancies, one of which has resulted in a live birth,” Hananel Holzer of the McGill Reproductive Center in Montreal said in a statement.

The research is still at an early stage and has not yet been proven in cancer patients, he told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).

But Holzer and other experts believe it has the potential to become one of the main options for fertility preservation.

This is good news for parents who want a baby, but not 5 or 6.

Some celebrities have spoken out about having ‘eggs’ frozen for future options. Sherri Sheppard, who frequently co-hosts ‘The View’ recently said that she eggs frozen for future a pregnancy.

Hopefully this will offer a more concrete answer for couples who cannot conceive naturally.

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Three-week-old Alexandre Mercier slept through his moment of fame, cradled in his father’s arms.

But his parents — and the couple’s fertility doctors — were all smiles last week as they celebrated the first baby born through natural-cycle egg donation.

The natural-cycle procedure is cheaper, less invasive and results in fewer multiple births than the better known stimulated-ovulation process, says Jacques Kadoch, a specialist in natural-cycle in vitro fertilization at the OVO Fertility Clinic in Montreal.

Kadoch said he hopes Alexandre’s birth — described as a world-first — will inspire other couples, and encourage more women to donate eggs.

The private clinic, which has links with the Universite de Montreal teaching hospital, has about 100 women on a waiting list for donor eggs.

In Alexandre’s case, it was his aunt, Nathalie Ladouceur, 35, who donated the egg to help her sister, Manon, who was born without ovaries.

After only one try at fertilization, Manon gave birth to Alexandre on March 15.

“It was a miracle, a wonderful gift for us,” Manon Ladouceur, 41, said at a news conference to publicize the ground-breaking event. “I was always told I couldn’t have children.”

Kadoch said OVO is the only fertility clinic in Canada offering the natural-cycle procedure, which has a success rate for about one in three women under 35 with fertility problems.

Stimulated-cycle fertilization has a success rate of about 60 per cent, but it also comes with a 60 per cent chance of multiple births.

Women undergoing the stimulated-cycle procedure get hormone injections twice a day, for about three weeks to stimulate the ovaries, Kadoch said. The two healthiest eggs are removed to be fertilized in a lab and then transplanted to the patient.

n the natural-cycle procedure, one healthy egg that matures naturally is fertilized and transplanted, he said.

Nathalie Ladouceur took only minimal drugs to prevent early ovulation, said Robert Hemmings, who oversees OVO’s egg donation program. The sisters also followed a brief drug therapy to get their body cycles in sync, prior to fertilization.

Manon said she and her husband, Alain Mercier, paid about $5,000 for the fertilization treatment; stimulated-cycle procedures can cost more than $10,000, including medication.

Neither procedure is covered by government health insurance but Quebec offers a 30 per cent tax credit, to a maximum of $6,000 a year, to patients who undergo the treatments, said OVO clinic director Renee Cardinal.

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Boston IVF today announced a participant in their fully enrolled egg freezing study has become pregnant. This is the first pregnancy in Massachusetts to result from egg freezing. The study was performed by Boston IVF and sponsored by an independent medical grant from EMD Serono, a biotech company with an area of focus on infertility.

The process of successfully freezing eggs is very delicate and arduous. The egg is the largest cell in the human body. It is comprised mostly of water and thus very difficult to freeze without destroying it. Boston IVF uses technology that replaces the fluid with molecules that make the egg less vulnerable to freezing and more viable for fertilization once they are thawed.

“The pregnancy resulting from this study is a major milestone for Boston IVF and holds enormous promise for patients who hope to preserve their fertility by freezing their eggs so that they can become pregnant at a later time in their lives,” said. Dr. Michael Alper, medical director of Boston IVF and lead investigator in the study. “We now have the option of suspending a women’s biological clock. Egg freezing is also particularly wonderful for cancer patients who may become sterile from chemotherapy. Under the leadership of Boston IVF’s scientific director, Dr. Douglas Powers, we plan to continue our research to perfect technologies that will provide patients with the most effective and safest options for building families.”

Celine Dion has spoken openly about the fact that she has a fertilized egg waiting in storage just in case she wants another baby later.

She thinks that the second one will be a twin for her first child Rene Charles,6. She became pregnant with her first child through in vitro fertilization.

More information available at www.ivf.com

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After having their wombs removed and then reconnected, four sheep have become pregnant.

This is an important step towards womb transports being done in women.

Professor Mats Brannstrom and colleagues carried out an autologous transplant in the sheep – where the same womb is removed and reconnected.

There is still work to do before such transplants are safe as New Scientist reported that half the sheep in the study developed fatal complications.

Earlier this year a team in New York announced their intention to carry out the first womb transplant in the US using a donor organ from a woman who had died.

The procedure would potentially allow women who have had their wombs damaged or removed to develop a pregnancy and give birth.

A womb transplant has been tried once before, in Saudi Arabia in 2000, but then the womb came from a live donor, and was rejected after three months.

One of the difficulties of a successful transplant is the complexity of the blood vessels that need to be reattached.

Pregnancy would put even more strain on these connections, with very dangerous consequences if something was to go wrong.

When transferring a womb from one person to another, one of the biggest problems would be rejection, especially if that occurred during a pregnancy.

Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology said it was very important that the proof of principle was tested in animals before being attempted in humans.

“They are going the right way about it, instead of racing off to do the work in humans.”

He added that transplant technology in humans had progressed tremendously and it had been shown that certain drugs used to prevent rejection in renal transplants did not harm a baby during pregnancy.

In 10 years a womb transport will become a normal procedure. This is good news for women who have been born without a uterus, those with abnormal tissue growth called endometriosis, and women who lost a womb to non-cancerous tumors called fibroids.

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