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IVF ‘Add-On’ Procedures Offer False Hope
New research suggests that costly extra services lack evidence that they work
When Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos and her husband were trying to conceive with in vitro fertilization (IVF), they were presented with many “add-on” procedures that they were told would increase their chances of a successful pregnancy. “We were relying on the physicians to give us the information and guide us,” she says.
After several years, three IVF cycles, and $50,000 later, Tsigdinos and her husband were still unable to conceive. “Most women don’t talk about it because it’s traumatizing,” says Tsigdinos, author of Silent Sorority.
Couples often pay a premium price in hopes of conceiving a child. A single cycle of IVF can be $12,000. And the costs don’t end there. Couples at fertility clinics are frequently offered pricey “add-on” services touted as ways to increase the chances of IVF success.
However, two new studies published Tuesday in the journal Fertility and Sterility suggest that there’s very little evidence (and in some cases, no evidence) to support the use of these add-ons, including procedures like immune therapies and endometrial scratching. Not only do they not increase a woman’s likelihood of conceiving and giving birth, but some add-on procedures may also even cause harm to women, eggs, and embryos.
What’s more, some add-ons may even reduce the chance of a live birth. Take an embryo screening method called preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A), which costs around $5,000: Screened embryos that have abnormalities are routinely discarded, but new data from a large 2018 study found that some abnormality discoveries do not actually impact the embryo’s success. “We now know that those embryos were probably fine, and a lot of those embryos that we would have previously thrown away, now we transfer them and they turn them into babies,” says study author Jack Wilkinson, a lead researcher at the Centre for Biostatistics at the University of Manchester who has a PhD in measuring outcomes in IVF.
Most of the IVF add-ons routinely made IVF more complicated and increased the cost without any clear benefits.
