The delay in childbearing is an important societal change contributing to an increasing incidence of subfertility. The prevailing concept of female reproductive ageing assumes that the decline of both quantity and quality of the oocyte/follicle pool determines an age-dependent loss of female fertility. There is an apparent discrepancy between the ability to maintain a regular ovulatory cycle pa...

In humans, the fertility in female declines slowly from the age of 30 years [1,2]. Embryo implanting ability and survival start declining gradually after 30 years of age, but by more than two thirds after 40 years and in younger women with reduced ovarian reserve [3]. While decline in the frequency of intercourse is one of the reasons, reduction in the quality of either the embryos arising from...

BACKGROUND Women have been able to delay childbearing since effective contraception became available in the 1960s. However, fertility decreases with increasing maternal age. A slow but steady decrease in fertility is observed in women aged between 30 and 35 years, which is followed by an accelerated decline among women aged over 35 years. A combination of delayed childbearing and reduced fecund...

Exposure to an adverse early-life environment leads to long-term health problems, many of which are recapitulated in subsequent generations. The female reproductive tract is particularly sensitive to early-life influences, and plays a pivotal role in programming the conceptus. We examine the influence of suboptimal grandmaternal diet on reproductive potential of granddaughters in the absence of...

Eusocial insects provide special opportunities to elucidate the evolution of ageing as queens have apparently evaded costs of reproduction and reversed the fecundity-longevity trade-off generally observed in non-social organisms. But how reproduction affects longevity in eusocial insects has rarely been tested experimentally. In this study, we took advantage of the reproductive plasticity of wo...

FOXL2 is a transcription factor that is essential for ovarian function and maintenance, the germline mutations of which are responsible for the Blepharophimosis Ptosis Epicanthus-inversus Syndrome (BPES), often associated with premature ovarian failure. Recent evidence has linked FOXL2 downregulation or somatic mutation (p.Cys134Trp) to cancer, although underlying molecular mechanisms remain un...

BACKGROUND There is a growing body of evidence that testicular function has decreased rapidly over the last 50 years. However, much less is known about corresponding trends in ovarian function. Herein, we examine the temporal changes in ovarian function in a large sample of infertile patients from the Czech Republic over a period of 14 years. METHODS In a retrospective study, we analysed a la...