Women don't regret embryo testing before IVF

A new study inquired if women who had their embryos tested before IVF was happy or they regretted the procedure, regardless of whether they had a normal embryo or not.

Surprisingly, 94 percent of patients who were surveyed admitted that they were glad to have the information regarding the embryo will successfully implant during in vitro fertilization (IVF), reported a new study published in the Journal of Human Reproduction.

This is the first study examining the risk of regret and anxiety following screening for chromosomal abnormalities in embryos before IVF.

"The traditional practice of IVF involves transferring an embryo, with an unknown likelihood of implantation, and finding out on the other end whether it will implant or result in a healthy pregnancy. We discovered that even after a negative outcome, most women found the information gained from embryo testing to be valuable for reproductive planning," said lead study author Dr. Kara Goldman.

"Older women understand their time is limited. If they lose three months because of a miscarriage, that's a lot of time. Most patients like the idea of having as much information in front of them as possible, so they don't have to go through the very difficult waiting period between the embryo transfer and the pregnancy test if the embryo wouldn't have resulted in pregnancy," Goldman added.

In genetic testing, clinicians check to see if there are too many or two few chromosomes, which will result in a miscarriage, an embryo that won't implant or a chromosomally abnormal fetus. The latter requires the parents to decide if they want to terminate the pregnancy.

A small but significant number of patients who had abnormal results, or did not get pregnant with one of their normal embryos, did feel regret after the testing procedure.

"The most common reason for patients to drop out of IVF treatment before they are successful is the psychological burden. Genetic testing of embryos is an area where we have thousands of patients using this technology and no one has studied the psychological burden of it," Goldman said.