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Of course, some clinics have much better pregnancy rates than others. Nevertheless, many clinics will quote inflated rates and this can mislead patients! Unfortunately, in India there is no central registry or monitoring of IVF clinics, so that you pretty much have to trust what the doctor tells you. In many countries in the West, the law mandates that IVF clinics report their pregnancy rates to a central authority - thus ensuring that IVF clinics maintain high standards and quality control. This regulation can be very helpful for patients.
Different programs define success in various ways. To most couples, success means the birth of a baby, not just a pregnancy, so that what needs to be determined is the "take home baby rate." Some clinics quote pregnancy rates when describing their success rates - and these can be considerably higher than the live birth rate, depending upon how a pregnancy is defined. Thus, some programs define pregnancy when the pregnancy test is positive; others define pregnancy as a fetus seen on ultrasound.
So-called biochemical pregnancies are also fairly common after IVF. These are pregnancies confirmed by blood and urine tests but in which the embryo does not develop beyond the earliest stage. No gestational sac and fetus is seen on ultrasound examination. Counting biochemical pregnancies will, of course, inflate the pregnancy rate.
Other ways of juggling with pregnancy rates include: accepting only patients who have a good chance of getting pregnant, or selectively reporting pregnancy rates achieved in younger women (and excluding other patients from data analysis).
Most good program today express their pregnancy rate as the number of babies born per treatment cycle, and this is the figure you should be looking at.
© Dr. Aniruddha Malpani and Dr. Anjali Malpani www.drmalpani.com
Credits: How to Have a Baby: Overcoming Infertility
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