Problems with sustaining pregnancy accounts for 2% of infertility causes.
Causes of infertility- difficulties in carrying pregnancy to term
About 1-2% of all women experience habitual miscarriages. These are three or more spontaneous miscarriages in a row that occur until the twelfth week of pregnancy. The very process of getting pregnant is unproblematic.
Which tests should be performed after miscarriage?
Repeated pregnancy loss an indication to perform diagnostic tests for the most common causes of miscarriages. Immunological diagnostics (tests for anti-cardiolipin antibodies, characteristic for thrombophilia; antinuclear antibodies, appearing in the course of autoimmune diseases such as lupus, sarcoidosis, scleroderma) are performed in women; as well as measurement of homocysteine concentration - its excess interferes with the process of embryo implantation in the uterus), genetic diagnostics (a karyotype test, also carried out in the partner; a test to detect factor V and II mutations associated with clotting disorders; MTHFR mutations) and also tests to detect infectious agents, for example, being a carrier of chlamydia, ureaplasma or active zoonoses. The patient's partner is subjected to semen test using the MSOME method and the SCD test (sperm cell DNA fragmentation test). Moreover, the occurrence of infectious factors is also checked.
If the results are correct but the patient does not become pregnant, the couple may benefit from more complex immune diagnostics, including tests of NK cells activity, lymphokine concentration evaluation, CD4 and CD8 lymphocyte subpopulations, and HLA tissue compatibility antigens. However, it is worth realizing that even after detecting the abnormalities and undertaking treatment (vaccines from the partner's lymphocytes, immunosuppressive drugs, intralipid, infusions of immunoglobulins, routine use of low molecular weight heparins, etc.), patients are not sure that they will be able to achieve improvement. The effectiveness of these methods has not been unequivocally confirmed and for this reason they are not used at InviMed infertility treatment clinics.
Difficulties in maintaining the pregnancy are an indication for the in vitro insemination procedure with pre-implantation diagnostics of embryos (PGS) at the further stage of the treatment. The embryos are examined before their transfer to the uterus for genetic abnormalities that may prevent their proper development and then lead to spontaneous miscarriage. Only normal and promising embryos are placed in the uterine cavity. In vitro with PGS allows to achieve pregnancy in about 68% of cases after a single transfer, but about 55% of couples fail to find embryos for transfer due to the presence of genetic disorders.