OBJECTIVE Obesity is a worldwide concern with detrimental health effects including decreased fecundity. However, obesity's impact on in vitro fertilization (IVF) is inconclusive and there is little data concerning poor ovarian responders (POR). This study explored the effects of overweight and obesity on IVF outcomes of POR. Design. We retrospectively evaluated 188 POR undergoing IVF cycles. ...

BACKGROUND In both in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), selection of the most competent embryo(s) for transfer is generally based on morphological criteria. However, many women fail to achieve a pregnancy after transfer of good quality embryos. One of the presumed causes is that such morphologically normal embryos show an abnormal number of chromosomes (aneu...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Women undergoing assisted reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), fail to achieve pregnancy in approximately 70% of cases. Postulating that among the possible causes of failure of embryo implantation might be an impairment of the uteroplacental circulation due to hypercoagulability in the mother, we inv...

This review provides an overview of how women adjust emotionally to the various phases of IVF treatment in terms of anxiety, depression or general distress before, during and after different treatment cycles. A systematic scrutiny of the literature yielded 706 articles that paid attention to emotional aspects of IVF treatment of which 27 investigated the women's emotional adjustment with standa...

BACKGROUND Only 25% of IVF transfer cycles lead to a clinical pregnancy, calling for continued technical progress but also more in depth analysis of patients' individual characteristics. The interleukin-1 (IL-1) system and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are strongly implicated in embryo implantation. The genes coding for IL-1Ra (gene symbol IL-1RN), IL-1beta, MMP2 and MMP9 bear functional pol...

Aspects of the immunological relationship between mother and conceptus still remain a mystery, although the recent advances in molecular biology have enlightened some of the parameters that participate in feto-maternal cross-talk during implantation. The atypical expression of major histocompatibility complex (MHC), the specific roles of some hormones and cytokines, as well as the temporal and ...

OBJECTIVE To estimate whether exercise before the first cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF) affects cycle outcomes. METHODS A total of 2,232 patients were prospectively enrolled before undergoing their first cycle of IVF for the treatment of infertility from 1994-2003 at three IVF clinics in the greater Boston area. The primary IVF outcomes of interest included successful live birth and fou...

Discriminant analysis (DA) encompasses procedures for classifying observations into groups (i.e., predictive discriminative analysis) and describing the relative importance of variables for distinguishing amongst groups (i.e., descriptive discriminative analysis). In recent years, a number of developments have occurred in DA procedures for the analysis of data from repeated measures designs. Sp...