ScienceDaily: Unexpected Results Of Biopsies Performed On Women With Fertility Problems May Hold Hope For Those Trying To Conceive
A very odd unintended result from a medical study:
The team took biopsies at several stages in the menstrual cycles of 12 women with long histories of fertility problems and unsuccessful IVF treatments to see if levels of this protein changed over the course of the cycle.
Indeed, the team's research went according to plan and they found evidence pointing to the protein's role. The surprise came soon after: Of the 12 women participating in the study, 11 became pregnant during the next round of IVF. The idea of biopsy incisions, basically small wounds, leading to such a positive outcome was counterintuitive, and Dekel realized something interesting was happening. She and her team repeated the biopsies, this time on a group of 45 volunteers, and compared the results to a control group of 89 women who did not undergo biopsy. The results were clear: The procedure doubled a woman's chances of becoming pregnant.
Its amazing how quickly medicine forgets things. For many years polycystic ovaries, a cause of infertility, was treated with wedge resections of the ovaries. This went out of favour when it was realised that PCOS was actually part of a more general problem of metabolism and IVF became the standard infertility treatment but perhaps the old gynecologists knew what they were doing.
ReplyDeleteGeoff
(When do you find time to work Steven?)