Infertility: Oocyte donation: comparison between recipients from different age groups

Abstract

Oocyte donation was carried out in 87 patients in 141 replacement cycles. These patients received oocytes from 108 women undergoing assisted reproductive technology procedures at our centre. Standardized hormonal replacement therapy and in-vitro fertilization procedures were performed. We divided recipients into four groups according to their age (group A, 21-35 years; B, 36-40 years; C, 41-49 years; and D, 50-61 years). Oocytes donors were 21-35 years old, and equally spread across these different age groups. There were significant differences in the pregnancy and implantation rates according to the age of the recipients; which were 45% and 23% respectively in women 21-35 years old (group A) versus 23% and 10% in women 41-49 years old (group C). A comparison of data between oocyte donors and young recipients, with similar results in donors and young recipients, with pregnancy rates of 45% and 42% and implantation rates of 23% and 19.5% respectively. Statistically significant differences were found between donors and the older recipients, pregnancy rates being 43% versus 23%, and implantation rates 18% versus 10%. These data seem to demonstrate a lesser likelihood of pregnancy and implantation in older recipients because of increasing uterine age.

The impact of the woman's age on the success of standard and donor in vitro fertilization

“…Several studies have addressed the effect of wom an's age on the success of IVF treatm ent with do nated oocytes (e.g., Sauer et a l [12,16], Abdalla et al [13], Flamigni et al [19]; Navot et al [14]; Check et al, [15]; Cano et al [21]; Borini et al [20]). The results were contradictory.…”

“…This effect was corroborated by Check et al (15), who could not find an aging effect of the uterus when hormone supplementation was prolonged until the endometrium thickness was >10 mm. However, this factor cannot explain the aging effects of the uterus found by Flamigni et al (19), Cano et al (21), and Borini et al (20), whose patients were all supplemented with high doses of P. More over, Meldrum (22) suggested that the low rate of spontaneous abortions observed in older women after donor IVF could be explained by the corrective effect of the hormone replacement. However, Cano et al (21) used high doses of P and found an in creased rate of spontaneous abortion in women of >40 years.…”

Egg sharing: a practical and ethical option in IVF?

“…Egg sharing has been reported in Australia [12], Belgium [13][14][15], Canada [16], Greece [12], Spain [12], the UK [12,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]103,104] and the USA [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37], and was practiced in Italy until legislation passed in 2004 that prohibited all forms of donor and third-partyassisted-conception procedures [38][39]. It is the sole legally permissible form of egg donation in Denmark [3,105] and Israel [40].…”

“…Several reports provide no information regarding outcomes for donors at all [29,[32][33][34]37]. Others, while providing outcome data for both donors and recipients, are restricted to pregnancy -or to pregnancy and implantation outcomes only -and provide no information regarding live births [19,28,30,31,35,36,38]. Only five studies provide data regarding live-birth outcomes for donors [14,17,25,26,34].…”

“…Current regulations in the UK are designed to ensure an equal distribution of available eggs (subject to a minimum number of eggs being available in any one cycle) between the donor and a single recipient, although eggs may be shared with a maximum of two recipients in any single cycle [48]. Although studies have shown higher pregnancy and live-birth rates for recipients than for donors, the reported results do not always achieve statistical significance [17,[26][27][28]30,31,34,36,38,49]; however, the evidence is contradictory. Research conducted by Kolibianakis et al found no significant difference in delivery rates between donors and recipients [14], while Thum et al found that both pregnancy and live-birth rates were similar for donors, egg-share recipients and women using their own gametes undergoing standard IVF [26].…”