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Is It Time to Switch Fertility Treatments?
Find out whether it’s time to change your fertility treatment plan
It’s been a few months since you’ve had your first fertility appointment at our Austin fertility clinic. Our team is honored to be helping you on your family-building journey. Hopefully, you’re making good progress towards your goal of having a healthy baby. However, if you’re not making the progress you’d hoped for, it might be time to make some adjustments in your fertility treatment plan. Whether you’re thinking about moving from Clomid to IUI or IUI to IVF, our team is here to support you as you make this decision. This guide can also help you decide what’s right for you and your family.
How do you know whether it’s time to switch fertility treatments?
It’s not uncommon for patients to want to start with a more basic treatment before moving to a more advanced one. Our Austin fertility clinic also believes in starting with the most basic treatment that is likely to be successful for each specific patient.
However, it’s sometimes necessary to move to another option to make parenthood possible. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you switch fertility treatments.
How old are you? Female fertility decreases with age, and this decline is more rapid after age 35. If you’re over 35 and fertility medications and IUI haven’t worked for you yet, it may be time to move to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
What’s your diagnosis? Some conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) can often be treated with fertility medications. However, some issues like tubal infertility and severe male infertility can often only be resolved with IVF.
How many children do you want? Time is frequently of the essence when it comes to treating infertility. As a result, you may want to pursue IVF if you want to have multiple children. Patients who pursue IVF often end up with multiple embryos that they can freeze and use for future pregnancy attempts.
What treatments can you afford? The financial side of fertility treatment presents challenges for many patients. This is why it’s important to understand your options and the chance for success with each of them. You may find that, despite its higher cost, it is sometimes more affordable to do one cycle of IVF than it is to pay for multiple unsuccessful IUI cycles.
In addition to asking yourself these questions, you should also discuss them with your doctor. Your fertility specialist can give you honest answers about your likelihood of conceiving using a certain treatment.
Don’t forget to consider the success rates of different treatments
By now, you likely know that many different factors can influence fertility treatment success rates. However, it can still be helpful to know the average success rates for different treatments.
- Unmedicated intrauterine insemination (IUI): Average pregnancy rates of 6% to 10%
- IUI with oral fertility medications: Average pregnancy rates of 8% to 12%
- IUI with injectable fertility medications: Average pregnancy rates of 20% to 25%
- In vitro fertilization (IVF): Average pregnancy rates depend significantly on age
- IVF with preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A): Average pregnancy rates depend significantly on the woman’s age and whether she wants to test her embryos’ chromosomes,
but for every chromosomally normal embryo that we transfer, you should expect a pregnancy rate of 60-65%
If you have more questions about whether you should switch fertility treatments, we invite you to contact us. Our Austin fertility clinic team is here to provide information and support.
