Male Factor - #of IVF for BP

[lauralouisell]

Hi, we have low sperm count (less then 5 million). I am very fertile with 2 natural births via my ex husband (no fertility issues). we are getting ready to start IVF treatment (new husband) and was wondering if anyone with Male factor issues had BFP's and what IVF cycle you got a BFP.? i am 35 and DH is 37.

thanks.

[CT_Michele]

We are male factor only. They never gave us a sperm count #, but it is extrememly low. No sperm in the ejaculate, my husband had to go through a TESE procedure to get sperm directly from testicular tissue, and it took a good lab tech 60 minutes to find 8 sperm to match my 8 eggs, so really really low numbers. We got a bfp our first time, our daughter is 7 months old and we are about to try for our second child. I am 27, dh is 32. Good luck!

[lauralouisell]

thanks michelle, congrats and great to hear such positive results with low counts and first IVF's.

[nicaliw]

We are also male factor. We got pregnant first try but miscarried, then got pregnant with my now 3 month old son with the first FET a few months after miscarriage. Good luck!

[kerpupples]

Male factor here too. Counts have been as low as 10,000 per sample. Got a BFP our second fresh cycle but miscarried. I'm due in May from our second FET. Good luck, hopefully you're as quick as the other ladies on this thread.

[lauralouisell]

ok great to hear. i feel like we'll be good the first of second IVF but i don't want to get my hopes up. Because i am fertile and the problems are on DH end i feel like i will take relatively quickly. sounds like our low 6 million count isn't too bad really....for IVF...

i did mc with my first natural pregnancy at 6 weeks but the following two pregnancies were great.

[hope33]

My dh had very low sperm count as well and we became prgenant with the first IVF cycle even though We had to freeze the embryos and dely the transfer a month b/c i was hyperstimulated but when we did do the transfer it took with the first try. I was 30 at that time. At 34 we did another FET but got a BFN and our third FET we got our BFP now i am 17 weeks. Still have 2 frozen embryos from 5 years ago. will like to try for #3 in about a8 months from the time this baby is born. Wishing you tons of luck!

[lauralouisell]

congratulations. glad to hear good news about frozen embryo's too...

[riogirl71]

We also got pregnant on our first IVF with male factor only

[ann d.]

lauralouisell... Good luck to you as you begin our IVF journey. IVF can be an emotional roller coaster, but as you can see from the other posts, there are many success stories.

In my case, I have never been pregnant before trying IVF. We couldn't find anything wrong with me, but my husband had a low count with poor motility. We got pregnant on my first FET but miscarried after 7 weeks and then we are now pregnant on our second IVF. (On our 2nd IVF we used 5-day embryos as opposed to 3-day embryos.) In my heart, I think that made a big difference. However, I've heard success stories from many others using 3-day embryos.

The RN at our clinic says that IVF works really well for those couples with a male issue and no female issue. Again, good luck to you!!!

[Wondercat]

lauralouisell - First, it's hilarious for me to hear that "less than 5 million" is low! In our case my husband's sperm count was 0, which I guess is pretty much as low as you can go. He has congenital bilateral lack of vas deferens, so his little guys were all dressed up with no way to go anywhere. Like CT_Michele, he also did the procedure to extract the sperm directly from the testicle and they used ICSI to fertilize the eggs.

The first time we did IVF was two years ago, and even in that time the extraction method was improved for this cycle that we just did in February. Although I was 27 then and have absolutely no issues, our first two tries with the first sperm samples did not take (one fresh, one FET). But there was clearly an improvement in results from the beginning. The first time we got 7 embies, this time we got 17! We did a day-5 transfer 2/23 of 2 blastocysts and one took.

So for us, third try was the charm for our BFP with male factor.

Good luck!!

[SilverAngel679]

We're also male factor. We've done 3 IVF's. First was a BFN, 2nd was a BFP with slow rising betas that ended in miscarriage at 14 weeks and our 3rd time around was a BFP resulting in our twin boys born 2 weeks ago. There is hope, hang on to it.

[Molly23]

We were male factor with low sperm count, morphology, and motility. We did IVF with ICSI on first try, and got pregnant with twins. I am now 12 weeks pregnant, and everything so far is going great.

Good luck!

[Marina_A]

When you look at the male factor,it's not only # , morphology or motility-all these very easy to avoid with ICSI when you do IVF.Hopefully this is the only problem for your DH . We had 3 IVFs,1st ended up in m/c at 16 weeks,2nd didn't take and 3d we got pg with triplets(transfering 2 embryos),but two of them stopped growing at 7 and 14 weeks.The problem is, my DH has a high % of DNA sperm fragmentation and even we did ICSI each time it's still kinda a gamble-wait for the right sperm to fertilize the egg.
Some times this is just a matter of time and luck.But if he only has a low count,it shouldn't be a big problem.Good luck!

[Arabsrcool]

Hello!

Just wanted to add my story. Male factor, low counts and they were not good swimmers!. 1st IVF with ICSI, I got BFP. ICSI pretty much takes of of alot of issues, as long as they can get some "boys" to work with.

Good luck!

Ronda