It’s a difficult question to answer because it depends on several factors, such as the patient’s age and the type of IVF treatment being done. For example, if a patient transfers healthy embryos that have undergone preimplantation genetic testing (PGT-A), success may happen after the first or second embryo transfer. However, for patients in their 40s who have not tested their embryos or if the embryo quality is low, predicting success becomes more complicated. In such cases, embryo quality plays a significant role in determining the chances of success.
Not always the first IVF cycle is going to be successful, unfortunately. Sometimes we have to do several treatments until we achieve pregnancy. So more or less, normally we have to do two to three treatments before we achieve that pregnancy. Obviously, this is going to depend on the individual conditions of the woman or of the partner because sometimes we have several factors that could be affecting our pregnancy rates. But on average we have to think about doing 2 to 3 treatments meaning embryo transfers, maybe one patient can do only one IVF treatment and afterward, have several embryo transfers because she has many embryos achieved from the first cycle, other times unfortunately, people have to go for several rounds of ovarian stimulation to achieve each time, maybe, one embryo for each embryo transfer.
It depends on the characteristics of every single case and it’s real that most pregnancies arrive in the first, second or third cycle but other patients maybe should rethink how many cycles they really want to go through because age is always important – the older the patients the lower the chances of getting pregnant using their own eggs. At some point you have to discuss the possibility of going for an egg donation.
It’s quite a common question that patients ask me. It’s true that in most cases, the first cycle of IVF is going to be unsuccessful and that they may need to go for more than one round in the majority of the cases. This is something that is going to depend a lot on the age of the woman. If we are treating a young girl, let’s say 27- 28 with a tubal factor and everything else is okay, the success rate of the first transfer is going to be very high, probably more than 65%. The success rate of the first cycle could be even higher than 85%. That means that only 15% of these patients may need a second round of IVF.
On the other side if we are treating a patient who is 43 years old with a low variant reserve, unfortunately, in these cases, most of the cycles are going to be unsuccessful. The pregnancy rate of the first attempt can be as low as 5 or 6 %. This is an answer that should be given individually to each patient based on their own characteristics and on their own problems.
On average, for example, our pregnancy rate for people younger than 35 is over 65% in the first transfer. For people between 35 – 40, it’s going to be around 45 to 50%, for people who are over 40 and up to 42, it could be 35 to 38%. Over 42 is when the pregnancy rate decreases, and it comes to a 10-15%. Based on that, you can get an idea of how likely it’s going to be that you may need more than one round of IVF until you get your baby.
