It is very well known that as the women get old they have poor quality eggs but also fewer eggs and this can impact on fecundity or fertilization ability of women’s eggs or her fertility. Past age 35, the number of eggs that women have declines rapidly and above the age of 40, 45 and 50 there are very few follicles producing eggs that will enable women to fertilise those eggs and give live birth. Not only the number of eggs is a problem available for the reproductive cycle, the quality of the eggs are also a problem. So, as the woman gets older, those eggs that are in her ovaries have been sitting in the state of rest since before she was born and they wait for ovulation and they wait for the egg to be fertilised. If that doesn’t happen, an ovulated egg will kind of die off but those that are not fertilised or ovulated, they remain in that state of rest. Quality of those will decline with time, so they can be sitting in this state of rest for 40 odd years and when they eventually are ovulated, they can result in poor fertilisation and pregnancy outcomes. So there is a very clear relation between a woman’s age and quality and the number of her eggs available for fertilisation and reproduction.
Fertility and egg quality – if your eggs are not very resilient, then they may have difficulty making it through those first three days of development before the embryonic genome really switches on. The embryo takes over control of its development and growth from about day four and if your eggs aren’t very good, then they may not be able to make it through those three days so it’s going to impact your fertility.
Some women that have low quality eggs unfortunately will end up suffering from infertility. Therefore, if they have been through for a number of IVF cycles with their own eggs and they have not been able to get pregnant with their own eggs because we’ve had either no fertilization or we’ve had very low fertilization and poor quality embryos which have not implanted and have not produced a pregnancy, then the only option for for those women would be to look into having an egg donor treatment where they can use eggs that are donated from young women, healthy and also much better quality eggs.
Yes, fertility can be impacted if unfortunately your ovaries don’t have enough eggs or are producing low numbers of eggs and poor quality eggs.
