Study Reveals Frozen Donor Embryos May Often Go Unused
February 15, 2010
Many women who successfully have a baby using donated eggs do not try to achieve a second pregnancy with the excess embryos they've chosen to store, suggests a study at NYU Fertility Center. The new study, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, included 829 women who underwent IVF using donor embryos at the NYU Fertility Center between 2000 and 2004. Overall, more than half - 54 percent - had a baby, or multiples, after the first attempt. Of those women, 177 - or 40 percent - had also elected to freeze and store any extra embryos that were not implanted during the first IVF attempt. But by August 2009, only 21 percent of those women had returned to the clinic to try for a second pregnancy using the stored embryos, according to Jaime N. Knopman, MD, and colleagues.
