There is not a fixed number of attempts that should be done before giving up. That will depend a lot on each case. For example, if we are stimulating a single woman, 44 years old, with a low ovarian reserve, probably one attempt would be enough to decide if the patient should continue stimulating the ovaries or if it’s better to change the treatment and consider egg donation. In other cases, for example, young couples with a genetic condition, we may consider up to 3 or 4 attempts depending on the results of the genetic test until we succeed. Once more, we should individualize each case and, depending on the results, decide if it’s worth trying again or giving up on that particular treatment. Because, a patient can stop doing IVF with her own eggs, but we may consider egg donation or embryo donation, which will offer very good results in those cases.
Well, it’s a difficult question to answer how many times a patient should undergo IVF before giving up. It’s true that we need to consider some other factors, such as age, the kind of treatment the patient is undergoing or additional factors like endometriosis, quality of the eggs and the sperm and so on. So, of course is important to put a limit, as always, but is difficult to say if a patient should undergo just one cycle or even more. Everything will depend on the kind of cycle, as I mentioned, and even on the age. So, we are talking about a patient that is around 40 years old or even older, and if the patient underwent the preimplantation genetic screening of the embryos with no healthy embryos to transfer, it could be time to discuss different options such as egg donation. However, we are talking about a younger patient with good-quality embryos that didn’t implant for any reason, we should try to do a different kind of test with the idea of knowing more about that patient. So, it’s important to consider each patient in a different way, we need to consider all the important medical information to make the best decision for that patient.
