This is also very individual. Around the age of 30, it’s normal to react ovaries giving 10 to 20 eggs. Around the age of 35, it would be somewhere between 7 and 15, or 6 to 14. At the age of 40, it is unusual to have more than 10 eggs — probably somewhere between 1 and 10 eggs. Of course, again, 10–20% of 40-year-old patients have an ovarian reserve above average and can produce 15, 20, or 25 eggs.
But the quality of the eggs is the same. It doesn’t really matter if I have 5 eggs or 25 eggs at the age of 40 — the quality and the chances, and the aneuploidy rate, are the same.
It all depends, and it really varies on the ovarian reserve of the woman. If the woman has a very high ovarian reserve, or a very good ovarian reserve, the aim is not to give a very high dose of hormones, because ultimately a good number of eggs is around 10 to 15. Anything more than that can also affect or impact egg quality which will ultimately affect embryo quality and anything less than 10 again may give a bit of a suboptimal chance at getting a good number of blastocyst. We all know that we’ve got to work with what we have and in women who have got a low AMH or low ovarian reserve – you’re never going to get 10 eggs potentially, depending on the ovarian reserve of course. If the ovarian reserve is low, you may want to recommend multiple cycles to the patient, so that they can match embryos. So there is no ideal number nowadays, it all depends on what the ovarian reserve of the patient is. But yes in patients who have got polycystic ovaries, we want to make sure that we are reasonable in the amount of hormone that we use for stimulation, because we don’t want to collect 30 and 40 and 50 eggs absolutely because numbers is one thing and the quality is another. We want to have a good balance of quality and quantity.
