I think that the pros are usually the best possible response — we are speaking about low responders. This is a group of patients where you’re not expecting overstimulation, so you sort of don’t have this risk at all. And, of course, there’s a risk of premature ovulation, but still quite minor when you do the antagonist. Especially in women with shorter cycles, when you introduce the anti-estrogens, they might grow one leading big follicle that might lead to premature ovulation.
Difficult one because I personally do not see mini IVF with pros of cons. This is just a different approach – a way of doing tailored treatment to our patients. We have to pick patients who would benefit from this kind of approach. So, pros and cons would be the ones that your doctor, your IVF doctor, tells you when recommending one type of treatment or the other one. I guess that is the most important thing.
The risk that we have is with natural IVF. So there is a 10 to 15 percent chance that your cycle can get canceled because as I said, we are following your natural follicle, we don’t have a lot of control over it, your body is doing what it can and there is a possibility that you might ovulate before you feel it is ready to be collected so you might want to ovulate on a smaller follicle, or before, in between the days your LH starts rising (the hormone that is responsible for ovulation) sometimes you can even ovulate a couple of hours before we take you for egg collection. So these are the kinds of risks, there are of course risks that there is a small number of eggs that we are collecting, one during natural cycle, fewer in mini IVF. With fertilisation there may not be any during this, there might not be any growth of the embryo, we might have nothing to transfer. So those are the types of risks, it becomes a risk here when the statistical number of eggs is lower here and obviously the risks of these kinds become higher.
