Births bring new hope to childless

All were taking part in a pilot study testing the effectiveness of a new method of looking for chromosomal abnormalities.

It could pave the way to women with a history of In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) failure achieving successful pregnancies.

The new method could also make it easier for women to give birth later in life when there is less chance of becoming pregnant.

But doctors involved in the trial stress that the technique can only help them identify viable eggs – it does nothing to improve the chances of producing high quality eggs in the first place.

The European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) announced that women at two centres in Bonn, Germany, and Bologna, Italy, had given birth to healthy babies after undergoing this method which unlike other screening methods, tests all 23 pairs of chromosomes in a cell, not just a limited number.

The German patient, aged 34, gave birth to twin girls in June. Three months later the 39-year-old woman in Italy gave birth to a baby boy.

Later it was revealed that two more women aged 37 at the Bonn centre had given birth to babies in August.

A number of other women from the total of 41 taking part in the study are said to be at advanced stages of pregnancy.

The method utilises the two polar bodies – incomplete daughter cells produced during cell division containing unwanted copies of a woman’s chromosomes.

Although the polar bodies are never fertilised, the chromosomes they contain are an exact copy of those in the egg before and at the time of fertilisation.

Studying the polar bodies therefore gives doctors a picture of the internal genetic state of a woman’s eggs.

Although it focuses on female infertility, 95 per cent of chromosomal abnormalities affecting birth are found in women.

The study provides proof in principle that this method works.

More extensive trials on selected populations of patients are now needed, but doctors believe the technique might become part of clinical practice within two or three years.

Eshre chairman Professor Luca Gianaroli said: “We have learned from more than 30 years of IVF that many of the embryos we transfer have chromosome abnormalities. Indeed, it’s still the case that two out of every three embryos we transfer shall fail to implant as a pregnancy, many of them because of these abnormalities.

“The whole world of IVF has been trying to find an effective way of screening for these abnormalities for more than a decade, but results so far have been disappointing with the technology available. Our hopes are that this will finally provide a reliable means of assessing the chromosomal status of the embryos we transfer.”

One advantage of the technique is that tests are carried out on eggs, not embryos. This offers countries such as Germany which forbid embryo analysis, a legal method of pre-implantation genetic screening.

Dr Markus Montag, one of the trial researchers from the University of Bonn, said the 34-year-old mother from his centre had been through a number of failed IVF attempts.

The average age of patients in the study was 40, well past a woman’s most fertile years. But Dr Montag said women should not be encouraged to delay motherhood in the belief that such techniques can get them pregnant.

“Women should not wait until their 40s,” he said. “Egg selection only works if there is something there to select.

“If a woman’s oocytes (eggs) are all bad, she is not going to succeed with IVF.”