Reproductive surgery: minimally invasive interventions to restore fertility

We need to evaluate the situation of this kind of uterus. There’s consensus about which type of myomas we must remove to improve the pregnancy. Generally, the submucosal myomas, which are the myomas inside the cavity we should remove them and the myomas that are located on the outside of the uterus maybe we don’t need to treat those. When it comes to myomas in the middle of the uterine wall, it depends on the location of this kind of myomas, on their size, and then we can check if they should be treated or not. We always need to evaluate the situation if the patient already had embryo transfers and failed with several embryo transfers, maybe we need to plan to extract the myoma. If the patient had no transfer possibly, we wouldn’t need to remove the myomas, but if the patient has a lot of failures, we can remove it, it would be better.

I don’t see any relation between the hysteroscopy and the fallopian tubes and starting a cycle again. There’s no problem, you can start with the cycle.

Adenomyosis is an inflammatory condition, it’s like endometriosis inside the uterine walls. The uterus with this condition needs to be treated before transferring the embryos or at least that’s what we do in our center. Possibly it could be a good thing to do this surgery, but I would need more details about the condition of your uterine cavity. We need to evaluate a lot of aspects of this kind of pathology. If we were to perform surgery, we would always need to treat you with GnRH to stop the menstrual period for at least two months or three months because the amniotic tissue is growing more with your hormones. If we decrease the hormone levels with GnRH, we can improve the possibility of pregnancy.

Adenomyosis is very difficult to treat, but we have a lot of experience in treating this kind of uterus. Sometimes the adenomyosis affects the morphology of the uterus or creates a synechia, or results in a lot of cystic lesions inside the cavity, but with surgical treatment, we can remove it.

Rejuvenation is the holy grail for the reproductive doctor, we are starting to do this kind of procedure, and we have done it with a few patients, but this is still for experimental purposes. This kind of procedure is useful mostly for young women with premature ovarian failure, which means that their menstrual periods are stopped before they are 40. In this kind of patient, if we use this technique, possibly we will be able to find some eggs in the ovaries, but the results are still not convincing. When we start to do this kind of procedure we improve the condition of the ovary in approximately 20% of the patients. So there is still some work that needs to be done when it comes to PRP, but it is a possibility, we can do that for sure. However, we still need to explore more and study more about this kind of treatment before offering that to the patients. I think most of the fertility centers do this kind of procedure for experimental purposes.

If you don’t have the experience in doing this kind of procedure, it is possible to injure the uterus, this can cause damage to the uterus, and this is very common in our community. The other thing is that it is painful most of the hysteroscopies that we do are done in the operating theater, so we do it under anesthesia, so the patient doesn’t feel any pain after the procedure, but sometimes we do it in an office. Sometimes, some pain like a menstrual period is possible but nothing else.

When you have adhesions inside the uterine cavity, the best tool to treat the adhesions inside the uterine cavity is hysteroscopy, for sure. When we do a lot of myomectomies, for example, we extract around 20 myomas from the uterine walls, we always do hysteroscopy two months after myomectomy to check the uterine cavity. There’s no problem with doing hysteroscopy after a
uterine surgical procedure.

This kind of uterus with this kind of features maybe will relate to the adenomyotic condition of the uterus. We can possibly look for this pathology, for adenomyosis, which is a condition where your uterus has morphological features, and if this is the situation, we can treat the disease with GnRH and also if you have a recurring implantation failure, we can do surgery. We can do it in this case, not only to correct the morphology of the uterus but also to create some scratch effect inside the endometrial layer. Sometimes, we do its procedure to improve the implantation process.

I don’t think you’ll need to remove the subserosal fibroids, but we always need to see the size of this kind of fibroids. Generally, these fibroids grow from the external layer of the uterus, so they do not affect the endometrial cavity. If the fibroids are too big and they press the uterine cavity, then maybe we need to treat this fibroid. I don’t see the indication for the subserosal fibroids to be removed.

When we have a submucosal myoma, we can treat them with a lot of different techniques and remove them. The most important thing is to disinsert the myoma and extract it from the uterine wall. If you extract the myoma from the uterine wall and leave the myoma inside the uterus, but if it is released from the uterine wall, you can keep it inside the uterus, but the word is not reabsorption. If you disinsert the myoma and leave it inside the cavity, the uterus can spill out spontaneously by contractions, this is normal. There is a paper about a multicenter study of myomectomy, and it says to always leave the myoma inside the cavity, and the myoma will be spilled out with the uterine contractions after one month, this happens frequently.

The short answer is yes. If we do the surgical procedure in your case, for sure, we will improve the condition of the uterus so you will have a higher percentage of success rate.

Yes, sometimes it depends on the treatment that you do to the uterus, for example, if you do the only hysteroscopy, there is no need to consider that it will be a risky pregnancy, but if we do an abdominal surgery to remove a lot of myomas, the users will have a lot of scars in the uterine wall, so yes, we would consider this a risky pregnancy. If you don’t wait until full recovery, so those 5-6 months after the surgery, sometimes, the pregnancy can cause a break in the uterine wall at some point, and this is risky. We always advise patients who had a myomectomy or multiple myomectomies to do a cesarean section when the baby is being born. It is best to avoid long or prolonged labor.

It’s the same thing, we use both to differentiate, but it is the same.

Normally, when we have an ectopic pregnancy, and it resolved spontaneously, as you’ve mentioned, possibly the tube in this part of the uterus doesn’t work very well, and sometimes, we can detect a liquid inside, it’s called hydrosalpinx, and so we need to check that. Hysteroscopy can detect other problems inside the cavity. You also need to know that as you are 42 years old, possibly the quality of the embryo is not the best, so this is another aspect that we need to take into consideration in this situation, not only the uterus.

By definition, the hydrosalpinx means that the tube is not working. Sometimes, when we do the endometrial preparation to do the embryo transfer, we can see the liquid inside the uterus, but we don’t know where this kind of liquid is coming from. You only need to check the tube, and if the tube is thicker with the liquid inside, definitely you must remove it before putting the embryo inside because the probability of pregnancy is lower with this condition.

It depends on the experience of the doctor that does the test. For me, it’s better to do the hysterosalpingography because you can check the tube thoroughly. With the HyCoSy, it depends on your ability to check it with the ultrasound scan to see all the trajectories of the tube. If the tube is normal, it’s easy to interpret this kind of study, but if the tube has been surrounded by endometriosis or surrounded by the adhesions, sometimes even if the tube is permeable, you can miss a diagnosis with HyCoSy because it’s difficult to interpret it in pathologic situation.

Yes, the PRP is now used in a lot of specialties. There are a lot of studies that are done to try to improve the ovarian reserve using this kind of option. The theory tells us that the PRP has a lot of growth factors that we can use to improve the growth of the follicles inside the ovary. Right now, we are using this kind of therapy sometimes, but it is only for experimental purposes. The AMH is quite low, which is connected with your age. My best advice in this situation would be maybe to do a cycle to see how your ovary behaves, administering the hormones, and if the ovaries did not respond possibly, your best option is to do an egg donation program. It’s not impossible to get pregnant at 40 years old with these hormone levels, it’s not impossible to have an embryo, but it is a difficult way.

If you have endometriosis stage 4, for sure, you have an adenomyotic condition of the uterus. It’s always linked with this kind of stage of the disease. If you have any kind of problems inside the uterus, maybe hysteroscopy would be a good option, or perhaps we could treat the uterus with the GnRH before the embryo transfer. At your age, the quality of the embryos might be good, but as you have endometriosis, the quality of the eggs can be affected because the eggs grow in the inflammatory environment inside the abdomen, so when we extract the eggs, they can be of worse quality. Possibly, we need to check the condition of the uterus more. Even if they removed a lot of diseases, we need to check the uterine itself, the uterine cavity, and the uterine walls because sometimes we need to treat the uterus before putting embryos inside.

There is a lot of controversies about the endometrial scratch, there are some groups that do not believe in this kind of treatment, but there is another group that gets very good results with doing the endometrial scratch. The endometrial scratch is advised for repeated implantation failure, so if this is the situation, perhaps you can benefit from that before another embryo transfer. If you already had 3 or more embryo transfers and you got a negative result, possibly you can benefit from that. If you never did the embryo transfer, it’s not the first option to do.

The short answer is yes, you will lose eggs during these 9 months, it’s like when you’re taking contraceptive pills, you are preventing ovulation, but you are still losing eggs during that time.