TRIP

Think you can't get pregnant? Try again, study says

Reuters Health News, 2012

Wed, Feb 1 2012 Wed, Feb 1 2012 Tue, Jan 31 2012 Mon, Jan 30 2012 Mon, Jan 30 2012
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Almost half of women who said they'd been struggling to get pregnant for at least a year ended up having a baby despite not getting fertility treatment, in a new study from Australia.
That success rate was only slightly lower than in women who also reported trouble conceiving and opted for treatment with fertility hormones or in vitro fertilization (IVF).
"Many women aged up to 36 years with a history of infertility can achieve spontaneous conception and live birth without using fertility treatment indicating (they) are sub-fertile rather than infertile," study researcher Danielle Herbert of the University of Queensland School of Population Health in Brisbane told Reuters Health in an email.
That means that if nothing is clearly wrong -- men make enough sperm, and women are ovulating regularly -- couples who have had trouble conceiving should still be optimistic they can get pregnant on their own, researchers said.
Courtney Lynch, head of reproductive epidemiology at The Ohio State University in Columbus, who wasn't involved in the new research.
"We know we can get women pregnant quicker if we have them go into IVF, but if we give women time, (many of them) can still get pregnant," she told Reuters Health.
Starting in 1996, participants filled out health surveys every few years, which included questions on pregnancy and childbirth.
The current data is from about 1,400 women age 28 to 36 who reported on the most recent questionnaires that they'd tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant for at least a year at a time.
Close to 600 of those women said they'd received infertility treatment using IVF or fertility hormones, including Clomid.
Through the latest survey in 2009, 53 percent of those women said they had a baby following fertility treatment, compared to 44 percent of women who'd had trouble conceiving but didn't seek treatment, the researchers reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility.