Click play to listen to this entire episode (which covers infertility, insomnia, wildfires and global warming, and mixing alcohol with diet drinks)
Mignon: There's some exciting news about infertility treatment. It's been 28 years since Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in the UK. And since that time, a new report from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology estimates that over three million babies have been born using some form of assisted reproductive technology.
Adam: That's amazing.
Mignon: Isn't it? I remember when Louise Brown was born and what a breakthrough that was.
Adam: And it's great that so many people who want to have children are now able to.
Mignon: Yeah, it's really amazing.
Adam: So welcome to the world all those made the old fashioned way or the new way.
Mignon: So there was another important phenomenon that is a trend away from multiple embryo transfers (and multiple pregnancies) towards single embryo transfer (SET) with the infertility treatments nowdays.
Adam: So is that reducing the number of multiple births, with fewer chances of quadruplets now?
Mignon: Yeah. They say that triplets have virtually disappeared in Europe, and apparently the Nordic countries and Belgium have led the way. So, in Sweden 70% of IVF treatments are now single embryo transfers, which is just amazing.
Adam: And I assume that is because the success rates have gone up so much.
Mignon: Right. They say it is more efficient, so birth rates have not gone down even though the number of embryos transferred has gone down.
The different countries have encouraged this in different ways. They say that in Finland, it happened because patients and clinicians just chose to do it that way, whereas in Sweden, it was through regulation, and in Belgium it was by using financial incentives because the state would pay for IVF treatment if the patients chose to transfer a single embryo.
Adam: And the result ended up being the same in all those places?
Mignon: I think so. That's what they said. The other interesting thing is that I know a bunch of women who have had twins, but who didn't get fertility treatment. And I was kind of curious and was Googling around and found other research, published in the journal Human Reproduction in February (2006), that reported that older women were more likely to have fraternal (non-identical) twins because they are more likely than younger women to have multiple ovulations in the same menstrual cycle.
Adam: So it kind of makes sense when we think of trends in terms of people having children later in life.
Mignon: Yeah, so multiple eggs are available to get fertilized as women get older. So if you see someone with twins, don't necessarily assume they've gone through fertility treatment. One friend of mine who had twins was astonished how many people, strangers, would come up to her and start sharing their infertility stories, assuming she'd been through the same thing because she had twins. Not always the case!
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