Spontaneous embryonic loss following in vitro fertilization: Incidence and effect on outcomes

Lower embryonic loss rates among twin gestations following assisted reproduction

“…Conversely, implantation of one embryo only, despite transfer of many embryos, may represent poor uterine receptiveness and/or poor embryonic quality, and hence, a higher miscarriage rate (5). This hypothesis indirectly corroborates that of Zegers-Hochschild et al (4) who maintained that some women have a high reproductive efficacy.…”

“…The ethical committee of the hospital approved the study. The same database was used for other studies (5,8).…”

“…Finally, the data of two different studies show that the general trend does not consistently depend on maternal age (5,8).…”

“…Our recent study (5) fully supports these observations, and, in addition, shows that this is also the case for triplet and quadruplet gestations. One may argue that the increased loss of singletons in the abovementioned studies (3)(4)(5) represents an excessive loss rate reported from these centers only. However, similar loss rates of singletons following IVF were reported in other series (6,7).…”

“…When these women are exposed to assisted reproductive technologies (ART), they produce better embryos, have a greater chance for more implantations, and consequently -they have a higher probability of having a multiple gestation. Following our initial studies (5,8), we conducted a secondary analysis to determine whether the number of transferred embryos in different maternal age groups influence these early spontaneous embryonic losses. The unique circumstance resulting from the ART protocols used in Reggio Emilia, where all available embryos are transferred in each cycle (5,8) enables this evaluation.…”