Ovarian reserve is the number of follicles in the ovary – total number but of course, we are not able to see these all follicles, only if we take the ovary out, do autopsy and count but nobody will do that. So, we have the markers of an ovarian reserve which can permit us to imagine how many follicles may be and mostly this we mean when we are talking about ovarian reserve and the main method to detect is anti-mullerian hormone and antral follicle count. Antral follicle count it is when we are doing ultrasound, we are counting how many follicles we can see so, very easy and quite good method and if we have some amount of AMH, some level and see that more or less this correspond to our antral follicle count, it is good to understand that real situation is like that but sometimes we can have discordance and in this case rise antral follicle count will be more taken in consideration than AMH level.
Ovarian reserve is the quantity of the eggs remaining in the ovaries. Usually we have several tests to check this in older women. These tests are established through different studies through the years. Usually we Anti-Müllerian hormone, the AMH which is a hormone that regrows the cells that the follicles are producing. We use the baseline FSH hormone and we use the number of follicles that we can visualise over a scan examination. Of course the ovarian reserve gives us a little bit of information on what is happening with the remaining eggs according to the age group in which every woman belongs. Therefore the ovarian reserve is related to age when the woman is performing the best and does not give clear information in terms of the egg quality. The egg quality is more related to the age in which the woman belongs and she wants to know about the normality of her eggs as well.
Ovarian reserve includes two different things: the quantity of eggs in a woman’s ovaries and the quality. By quality I mean the capacity of those eggs to develop healthy embryos when put together with sperm.
There is a way of measuring ovarian reserves, three different ways: one is AMH level, which speaks more of quantity than quality. Another is by doing an Antral Follicle Count which is a professional count of the small oocytes a patient can have in her ovaries. Another way is by her age. Women over 35 years old will have a worse prognosis.
The ovarian reserve is essentially the number of eggs a woman has within her ovaries. Interestingly women will have the highest number of eggs before they are born when they’re about 20 weeks old in their mother’s uterus. Now the ovarian reserve will slowly diminish with age because women are not able to produce new eggs. In the last few decades the ovarian reserve has been of paramount importance to the field of reproductive medicine because based on the ovarian reserve we know that different amounts of eggs can be yielded during IVF treatment but we must remember that for natural conceptions alone ovarian reserve does not necessarily predict the chances of pregnancy.
