Saturday 5 March 2005
Endometrial thickness 'important for selected IVF patients'
Source: Fertility and Sterility 2005; 83: 336-40
Exploring the role of potential confounding factors in mediating the influence of endometrial thickness on IVF outcome.
Endometrial thickness appears to be an important predictor of IVF outcome in young patients and those with poor quality embryos, study findings suggest.
As well as examining the relationship between endometrial thickness and treatment outcome after IVF and embryo transfer, the study explored the role in this relationship of potential confounding factors, such as peak estradiol levels and the number of embryos transferred.
Information on 897 IVF-embryo transfer cycles that used the patients' own oocytes was studied. Endometrial thickness was taken to be that detected by ultrasound on the day of human chorionic gonadotropin administration, 2 days before oocyte retrieval.
Treatment outcome was positively associated with endometrial thickness, overall, but subanalysis showed that this relationship was restricted to relatively young patients—those aged less than 38 years—while the older patients had low pregnancy rates regardless of endometrial thickness. Thin endometrium also reduced pregnancy rates in patients who required more than 10 days of gonadotropin stimulation and in those who had poor quality embryos transferred.
"With the exception of the age parameter, these results, taken together, suggest that inadequate endometrial thickness is primarily a problem in patients with relatively poor oocyte/embryo quality," conclude Zingqi Zhang (Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA) and colleagues.
Posted: 3 March 2005
http://www.obgynworld.com/internatio...l_thicknes.asp
Endometrial thickness 'important for selected IVF patients' 
