Relationship of Fertility Success Rates with Age Group

Rustu Soydan

Fertilization is a technique that helps women gets pregnant. It involves fertilizing a human egg with sperm in the laboratory and implanting the fertilized egg in the uterus and the chance of success varies by age group.

But what are those chances?

Fertility Success Rates Across Ages
The researchers followed thousands of women who began fertility treatment in 2016 and followed them through mid-2020.
They found that women who started IVF before age 30 had a 43% chance of having a baby after their first attempt, a 59% chance after two attempts, and a 66% chance after three attempts. In other words, 66% of women under 30 who had three or fewer attempts at fertility succeeded in having a baby.

Another way to look at it is that for women under 30, the first attempt had a 43% success rate, a second attempt increased the chance of pregnancy by 16 percentage points, and a third attempt increased the overall chance of success by another 7 percentage points.

For women who started IVF at age 35, there was a 40% chance of having a baby after their first attempt, a 54% chance after two attempts, and a 61% chance after three attempts.
By the age of 40, the results had dropped significantly: the chance of having a baby on the first try was 13%, after two tries it was 21%, and after three tries it was 25%.
This highlights that fertility success rates are not the same for every attempt. If you don’t succeed on the first try it’s unlikely you will succeed on the second, although the overall chances of pregnancy increase when both rounds are measured together.

Anna McLeod, chief executive of the Victorian Assisted Reproduction Authority (VARTA), explains that while the goal for everyone trying to conceive is to have a baby – preferably on the first try – this research gives people a realistic expectation of what is possible and how long it might take.

“Knowing that most people need more than one cycle to have a reasonable chance of success and that IVF births are less common the older you get is helpful for planning,” she says.
This is particularly important because IVF involves injecting hormones every day for two weeks to produce more eggs than usual, surgically removing the eggs, and the cost of laboratory labour. A single attempt can be hard on the body and can take up to 40 days or more. Additionally, a new round of fertilization should not be done for two consecutive months without a period in between, so 4-6 weeks is the minimum waiting period between a negative pregnancy test and a new cycle..”.

“If you want to have a baby in the future, learn more about your fertility and the factors that can affect it so you can plan ahead…