This week is National Infertility Awareness Week (#NIAW2022) and a good time to remind the many hopeful parents across St. Louis that it’s okay to have hope. If you’ve been trying to get or stay pregnant for 6-12 months without success, it might be time to speak to a fertility specialist.
For many, separating facts and feelings can be hard when it comes to understanding infertility and how best to treat it. Getting pregnant or staying pregnant isn’t easy for everyone in Saint Louis, we understand. There are many myths and misconceptions about fertility treatments like IVF that still create barriers for many hopeful patients.
A recent story in the media about Kourtney Kardashian’s IVF treatment experience seems to be creating as many questions as it’s answering for many readers. We asked Dr. Molina Dayal, Medical Director here at STL Fertility to address this new article and 43-year-old Kourtney Kardashian’s comment that IVF treatment put her into early menopause.
“IVF treatment does not put a woman into menopause. Material age continues to be the biggest barrier to overcoming infertility,” offered Dr. Dayal. “Every month every woman has a limited number of eggs or oocytes ready for ovulation. The others that month will arrest or die away, it becomes a “use them, or lose them” situation. IVF boosts the number of eggs produced each month, the opposite of menopause. IVF does not decrease the number of menstrual cycles a woman will have over her lifetime.”
Dr. Maureen Schulte, Operations Director talked about the connection between quality and quantity. “IVF treatment stimulates the ovaries to make more eggs but the older the patient is those eggs might be of lesser quality. With PGT-A, we can now see the quality or genetic balance of the embryos made from those eggs and gives us a better chance of success even for 43-year-old patients like Kourtney Kardashian.”