pgd question

[gigi]

Hey folks:

I am 40 and just lost a baby due to a trisomy syndrome. I did get pregnant naturally this time. Has anyone here had this experience and used pgd afterwards or has anyone here used pgd and have advice about it?

I have done ivf before and was successful about 2 years ago. I'm considering ivf again along with pgd but don't know anyone who has used the process. Any feedback would be great. Thanks a bunch.

gigi

[ltaylor]

Gigi,

I’m sorry to hear about your loss. I have had 2 miscarriages myself. I did not have the problem you mentioned but I did do PGD. My RE wanted me to do it because it was my 5th attempt and I still had no live birth. I’m not sure what you want to know about it but I’m glad I did it. My only caution is to make sure that the person doing it is VERY experienced because they are actually taking cells out of the embryo. If they mess up, it could kill the embryo. My RE flew in a guy from CA that is world renown for PGD and he did the biopsy. It was then sent to a lab in CA for testing. His name is Danny and he has done a ton of biopsies. He flies all over the country doing this for different clinics.

The report comes back from the lab and lists all the embryos by number. It will say abnormal male or female or normal male or female. Sometime it can be inconclusive. I had 12 embryos tested and 4 came back good (three boys and one girl), 3 were inconclusive (one boy and two girls) and 5 were bad (three boys and two girls).

If you have more questions, feel free to PM me. Good luck.

L

[gigi]

thanks for responding. it seems like we both just had miscarriages. this is so much work for us and so easy for others. i'm not sure i'm sold on pgd since what i read states that alot of good embryo can be lost because of the high false positive rate. are you going to do it again?

gigi

[ltaylor]

No, DH and I have decided to adopt. We exhausted my insurance benefits and I feel like we tried every reasonable thing to get pregnant. If we would have done another cycle I would have either used donor eggs or used my eggs and done PGD. I have to be honest and say I really didn’t research PGD that much. I trust my RE and he is the top doctor in my area. He only uses it in special cases and when he told me that I should do it, I agreed. I know what you mean about the hard work. DH and I finally came to the decision that being parents was more important than me being pregnant. Good luck with whatever you decide.

[brenda3]

Sorry to hear about your loss, I have also had 5 miscarriages due to trisomys ( 16, 17, and 21). When I asked my RE about it he said that it really would not benefit me. He said that there is no conclusive data that would help me, also that they could say that a good embryo is really bad when it is not . Said my were just flukes that happen not a certain disease. Hope this information helps.

[gigi]

what is AH?

PGD does not sound like an overall effective technique. Thanks for your response. I'm thinking it needs to be around a little longer before we invest in its effectiveness.

gigi

[brenda3]

Gina,

AH is assisted hatching. It is done before they do the transfer to help the embies be able to hatch so they can implant.

Brenda

[kate65]

We did PGD on our first IVF attempt a few months ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time for the same reason all of you are considering it: we'd had 3 miscarriages and confirmed chromosomal abnormality in at least one.

That cycle we had 9 eggs, all of them fertilized and all but one or two were dividing really well, so it would have been easy to do ET. The bad news: all 9 were sampled for PGD, just to be safe and all 9 came back abnormal, so no ET. We were devastated!

Since then, we've done a lot more research and had a second opinion. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with PGD. The sampling itself can hurt otherwise healthy embryos. More commonly, though, there's a problem with "mosaicism" in the embryos. That's when some of the cells are abnormal, but others are fine. The body does a pretty decent job of repairing those as the cells divide, but you wouldn't get a chance to see that happen if you saw the bad PGD results and threw them out.

I guess PGD was becoming really popular for awhile, but I understand just in the last few months there's been a bit of a backlash and it's no longer recommended. We're doing without it this time.

Here's an interesting alternative idea that we are trying, though (recommended by Dr. Davis at Cornell): an aggressive transfer. The idea is that your body will do an excellent good job of rejecting abnormal embryos anyway (that's why we're all having miscarriages, right?), so let it do the filtering naturally. Implant a lot more embryos than you normally would and improve your odds. Dr. Davis felt that with our lousy egg quality, we could safely transfer 5 or 6 without much risk of multiples.

Don't know whether it'll work, but just passing the idea along.

Kate

[brenda3]

That is what we also do (transfer higher 4-5 embies) instead of doing testing.

Best of Luck,
Brenda

[gigi]

Great feedback about the transferring of all the embies. it makes sense. it seems like the body knows best vs. man and his arrogance to test. i've decided after carefuly research to skip pgd. i am an avid researcher and realize that leaving mother nature up to deciding who goes and who doesn't seems the best way to go.

thanks for the feedback. i agree totally and am getting that feeling from all of the researchers at duke as well.

g