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Pelvic Inflammatory Disease and Infertility
Pelvic Inflammatory Disease can be responsible for:
primary infertility- when you have never been able to conceive or
secondary infertility- when you already have children but then became infertile.
Scar tissue caused by infection acts like cling film , sticking the pelvic organs together and blocking the tubes.
It is vital to get help as soon as possible, the sooner the investigations are done the sooner the treatment can start. This is important since the only option may be assisted conception techniques such as IVF – In Vitro Fertilization.
What is IVF – the process of IVF
IVF involves the removal of eggs from the ovaries, fertilization with the sperm in the laboratory and transferral of the early embryos into the uterus.
First , a test is carried out to ensure that the sperm count is healthy. Then the eggs are collected. Most women only produce one egg per cycle, but because IVF needs several eggs, the ovaries are stimulated to produce more. This involves the suppressing of the womans cycle, then stimulating the ovaries with special hormone injections to produce a number of eggs simultaneously. Over the next week or so you will make several visits to the clinic to monitor the development of the egg
To collect the eggs a gynaecologist will use ultrasound to give a clear picture of the reproductive organs he then will guide a thin hollow probe in through the vagina towards the ovary. Eggs are drawn into the probe by a gentle suction action. The probe is then withdrawn and the eggs are incubated for 24 hours.
Once the eggs are fully mature, they are carefully placed in a culture medium with 100 000 – 200 000 sperm from your partner for about 12 – 15 hours to allow fertilization to take place.
After two or three days in an incubator, a max of three of the best embryos is then transferred into your uterus. To minimize the risk of having twins or triplets, no more than two embryos should be implanted at a time.
Other Techniques
One other technique is GIFT ( gamete intra-fallopian transfer) . Rather than fertilizing the egg in the laboratory , the sperm and the egg are transferred into the open end of the fallopian tube, thereby allows fertilization to occur naturally. The resulting embryo can then arrive in the uterus at the correct point in the cycle allowing implantation to occur. The essential requirement for this is that at least one of your fallopian tubes must be healthy, the only draw back is that you have no idea if fertilization has occurred let alone implantation.
One week after the procedure a blood sample is taken to measure the progesterone level. If you have not had a period by about 16 days after retrieval, a test is done to detect the pregnancy hormone beta-hCG.
What is the Outlook?
Only about ten percent of couples achieve pregnancy on the first attempt at in vitro fertilization and the success rate leading to the birth of a healthy baby, is about 12 – 14 percent. With repeated ivf cycles, the pregnancy rate rises considerably to 50 percent.
