Fertility assessment for patients with endometriosis

It’s a very loaded question because you have several issues here. The first issue is the two laparoscopies for excision, we have to assume they were excision, and sometimes people call excision, but then they don’t do it. My advice would be to review them with your doctor to make sure that it was indeed excision. It looks like the symptoms are coming back, so that’s a factor. That’s like a big deal to have 4 chemicals on PGS normal embryos, that’s an issue. I would seriously consider the immunological evaluation. I don’t know if you’ve done that or if your doctor believes in this, but with 4 PGS normal embryos implanted and only biochemicals, I would say that probably, that’s like a factor.

When it comes to Decapeptyl, I’m not sure that it would make a difference because you implanted, but then you had the biochemical, so it’s not like you did not implant. It looks like it’s beyond that. Decapeptyl or oral contraceptives do the same thing. You could do like 2 months of oral contraceptive, which is the same as Lupron basically for what pertains to this the resetting of the lining or Aygestin norethindrone acetate 10 milligrams a day. I think that that’s sort of how I would do it, but I would certainly consider an immunological evaluation.

Adenomyosis is associated with reduced implantation, it’s unquestionable and very clear. Doctors under-diagnosed adenomyosis, they don’t see it, they don’t look for it, sometimes it’s there, and they don’t see it, sometimes they see it, but they ignore it, mostly because of the answer, and it’s a little like the answer of the other individual earlier who said my doctor said that people with lupus have a normal pregnancy, not all of them, it’s like telling people I know somebody who smoked their whole life and never developed lung cancer, not every smoker gets lung cancer, but if you smoke you are increasing the risk of lung cancer. Everything has to be looked at as per in risk, not in terms of possible or impossible. Everything is possible, nothing is impossible, but the point being whenever you have a failure, you have to look at your overall chance of success.

You have to say what are the factors that can affect my success, there may not be one factor, it could be a combination of factors, it could be like one factor is endometriosis, one factor is adenomyosis, one factor is an autoimmune condition, one factor is there you have a thin lining and so on and so on. You have to tackle each one of these factors. This is what we call personalized medicine. If you go to a doctor, a fertility doctor that has one of those: everybody’s the same approach, cookie-cutter, you’re not going to find your solution. Maybe you’ll be lucky, you’ll get pregnant on the first shot, but once you start failing, you need to start breaking it down and look at all the different factors, and that’s what you need to do.

Adenomyosis certainly plays a role, and I think that on adenomyosis, there’s pretty substantial data. Number one, you got to do a frozen embryo transfer, you can’t do a transfer on a fresh transfer, you’re just not going to get pregnant if you have significant adenomyosis. Second, you’re going to do hormone suppression before the next transfer. You got to do a transfer, either a natural transfer or a transfer with Letrozole, which suppresses estrogen to get your best possible opportunity for implantation.

There’s plenty of data that looked at the association between endometriosis and adenomyosis. They’re cousins, so they’re very tightly associated, and I want to say 30%, but I wouldn’t tell you the exact number, but the answer is, it is very common. Ultrasonography helps, but MRI also helps. I also want to add something else with the diagnosis of adenomyosis, the advantage you have when you have me here is I know a little of something about everything because I’m a surgeon, I know immunology and IVF, so I get a global picture. Sometimes, people don’t get this global picture.

One thing about adenomyosis is that when the radiologists read your MRI, some of them are old-school, they don’t know the modern way to look at it, they’re just looking at the junctional zone, which is like the zone by the endometrium and close to the endometrium. We don’t look at that anymore, there can be islands of adenomyosis, so you could have a normal junctional zone which is what they measure but then have islands of adenomyosis, and I see that all the time. I review all my MRIs, and I see tons of adenomyosis that were missed by radiologists, it’s crazy.

Endometrioma is a manifestation of endometriosis in the pelvis. It’s because of the way endometriomas happen, and this has been demonstrated over and over again. You have your ovulation, the egg pops out, there’s a little of a breach inside the ovary that has just ovulated, there’s endometriosis in the pelvis because that’s where endometriosis lives. Endometriosis is not endometrial tissue, by the way, and is not caused by retrograde menstruation. It’s the tissue that resembles the endometrium, but it’s not endometrium, it does not come from reverse menstruation, it comes from cells that are there from the early stages of embryo development, and they grow progressively over time. It’s sitting in the pelvis, and it climbs into the ovary, so whenever you have a recurrence of an endometrioma very soon after the surgery, there are two possibilities.

One is that a little of the endometrioma was left behind, which is a possibility, and you can’t blame the doctor in a sense that the doctor may be trying to be conservative on the ovary not to break it, to rip it and all that stuff. The second one is that endometriosis was left in the pelvis, so the instant you drop the ovary back in, you take out the endometrioma, you drop it in you got a raw surface whatever endometriosis is under climbs right back in, and there you have it, you have endometriosis again.

Do I recommend a new lap after a fairly recent one or IVF, provided he endometrioma is relatively small? I think that it depends on your age, but I would probably tell the person to do an IVF cycle and bank those embryos, see how many you have and then make a decision on what to do, that’s what I would recommend. At this point, I think I wouldn’t recommend another surgery right away, get some embryos out, make some embryos, bank them and then figure it out. I know these can be problems in Europe where they don’t like embryo banking, there are all sorts of rules everywhere, so it may not be feasible, I’m just talking in terms of generic terms.

Ubiquinol is a form of Coq10. The whole idea about behind ubiquinol is that part of the lecture that I did earlier you saw where I said that eggs have lower mitochondrial content. The whole idea is that by supplementing mitochondria, you’re increasing the egg energetic component. The mitochondria are like the engine of the cells, that’s one of the reasons. In terms of other supplements, NAC is a possibility, mostly on the pain side though. What I would probably suggest is to consider anything that lowers inflammation. I personally like tree bark, also called Pycnogenol, and I like curcumin, melatonin, so those are kind of the elements that are key there.

If you’re going to take one supplement that I think helps infertility, in my opinion, the one supplement should be fish oil, just because it’s both a blood thinner and an inflammation reducer. I don’t like it when people come with a list like this long of all these supplements because I feel that sometimes they fight against each other. If I should recommend 1 or 2, I guess I would recommend vitamin D3, we know that low vitamin D3 levels affect miscarriage, so I would seriously consider taking at least 5000 a day of vitamin D3. I would certainly consider taking at least 2000 fish oil.

That’s a very good question. Endometriosis is a disease, which is not as progressive as some think it, but it certainly progresses from the adolescent ages to adulthood, and those years are crucial in the development of endometriosis. My perspective as a physician but also the perspective of the endometriosis summit as an organization is that endometriosis should be treated whenever it presents itself. If, of course, the symptoms are severe enough. I feel that it’s essential to treat it the sooner, the better, we treat our adolescents, we treat young teens because the more you wait, the more you develop chronic problems, and there’s a chance to have a very different outcome in life if it gets treated early enough.

There’s a lot of parts in it. This is a very difficult question for me because obviously, I can’t comment on what’s worth or not worth it because that’s a personal decision. There’s no pressure for egg donation because it would have a similar outcome at 41 as at 43. In my experience, egg donation you could access later. I would say to try to get the surgery earlier, maybe go to another province. The advantage in Canada is that you could go to a different province, and if you push hard enough, you could get your laparoscopy earlier.

It’s a question that doesn’t have an automatic answer because it depends on one’s history, how severe the endometriosis is, your age. There isn’t a solution for everybody, but I’m going to try to sum it up. If you have very extensive endometriosis and an endometrioma, I would recommend excising the endometriosis first because if you have all those endometriomas, it’s going to be a mess, you’re not going to get a good result. The stimulation will indeed make the endometriosis worse for sure.

If you have done cycles before and poor egg quality, obviously go ahead and have the surgery, it makes no sense. If you have mild to minimal endometriosis and you and the doctor say, let’s bank some eggs first, and then you’ll do the surgery, then you’ll do the transfer, that’s also an option, so I would say severe, extensive disease surgery first just because you’re not going to have a good cycle. If you have like milder disease, the decisions should be based on your age.

Kudos to you for having endured such a tough seven cycles without, unfortunately, any good result. You’re asking me possibilistic questions, and anything is possible, so I can’t tell you.

You have a good AMH of about 1.24, which is a good value, and your question is: what do I do, do I go with donor eggs, or do I keep on trying. I can’t answer that question for you. I think that you’re getting close to where probably using an egg donor, if available to you, is a reasonable option. It’s already endometriosis-related, but definitely, that’s what it is.

One of the things to consider is that there is the possibility that you have an immunological problem, an autoimmune problem. What I think is that you probably should consider having some kind of immune evaluation. The other part of it is that fresh transfers can always be problematic. I would always try to go with a frozen cycle. I wouldn’t tell you to give up, if you haven’t tried, I would say to try with an all freeze option and maybe some immune support, whether its blood thinners. As I said, we’re going to come out with our immune panels soon, but I think that certainly, an immune evaluation may be worth it given the losses and 4 IVF cycles.

I always tell people that it depends on how you decide on donor eggs. If you decide to go ahead with donor eggs because of age or failed cycles, miscarriages, all the other stuff, it’s a separate story. The verdict with donor eggs and endometriosis is not out that much yet. I told you there are those two studies, the one from Carlos Simone and the other one. The chances depend on your age, you may not need a lot of support, so that would be the standard fertility doctor question, but if you had miscarriages, I would need more information, but in general, I would go with that.

We have to separate the use of GnRH agonists or antagonists in the context of suppression of pain where they’re completely worthless. Lupron or Orilissa, all these drugs, we never use them, or we seldom use them, I should say. We certainly do not recommend them, and within the context of IVF trials, I can tell you that there are limited data on the use of ovarian suppression, and the reason for that is to reprogram the uterus because of progesterone resistance.

The issue that I have with Lupron is that you do the retrieval, that’s like a month, then you do 3 months of Lupron, that’s another 3 months, and then you do the transfer, that’s another month, if you’re not successful, you wasted 6 months. Maybe you’re older, and you wasted 6 months just put yourself on Lupron where your ovaries may not even bounce back. To me, it’s not the best idea, I’ll be honest with you, but as I said, everything depends on your age and all other factors. The answers are very general certainly, if you had a history of depression, Lupron could affect you psychologically, why not do a couple of months of Progestins, it would be a similar effect on the lining.

We could have a whole thing on reproductive immunology, which could be fascinating but needs to look at different factors. First, check the compatibility between the couple, to look at HLA and see how the different HLA’s, the major compatibility complexes of the couple relate to each other. Make sure that there are no HLA mismatches and things like that. You have to look at serology, we have to look at the presence of any autoantibodies like antiphospholipid antibodies, anti-nuclear antibodies, rheumatoid factors. There’s like a whole number of other antibodies associated with autoimmunity.

There are some kinds of cellular factors that are associated with inflammation. The elevation of natural killer cells is one of them. Natural killer cells activity and TH1, TH2 ratios. Those are like T helper cells that play a role. There’s a panel that your doctor can order. In most countries, doctors can order these tests. Clexane is a blood thinner, like Heparin or Lovenox, which are blood thinners that may help but are used empirically. If it works, you don’t know that it worked because of that, and if it doesn’t work, you don’t know why it didn’t work.

When it comes to breast/ovarian cancer, I think the evidence is pretty clear that it does not increase the chance of recurrence or having cancer. When it comes to endo flare, for sure a 100% is the answer. I’ve seen so many individuals who, for example, were completely fine, maybe they knew that in mild endometriosis, they went to an IVF cycle and then after that, they developed severe pain, it became symptomatic, asymptomatic endometriosis became symptomatic. I see this all the time, so yes, you cannot ignore that, but you have to be on top of it. You have to communicate with your doctors, you’re sort of responsible to talk to your doctors and tell them that you have endometriosis, these protocols can affect you, and so that’s how you have to present it.