Women above age 40 years represent the most rapidly growing age group having children. So is the situation that patients undergoing in IVF are aging rapidly.
In recent paper "Improvements in IVF in women of advanced age" published in "Journal of Endocrinology", it concluded that the concentration on methods of embryo selection in older women not only fail to improve IVF outcomes, but actually, negatively affect live birth chances. Aside from breakthroughs in gamete creation, only pharmacological interventions into early (small growing follicle stages) follicle maturation will offer new potential to positively impact oocyte and embryo quality and, therefore, IVF outcomes.
The paper calls for more research shall be redirected into helping early follicle maturation. As the matter of fact, Chinese medicine has already been working in such a direction since a long ago. It is called menstrual regulation. With the aging or other pathological infertility conditions, this medicine including acupuncture and herbs works to improve the fertility functional efficiency and provision of nutrition supplement for small growing follicle stages and selection/dominance stage. Recent research inside China has proved that after couple months of treatments, more women including advanced age can have their menstruation cycle improved and become fertile naturally with/out IVF assistance.
