Starting a family after forty

A woman's fertility naturally starts to decline around the age of 30. The main reasons are the declining quantity and quality of eggs. There are also other reasons such as associated diseases. So, choosing the best stimulation type for you is very important. Our goal is to obtain sufficient quality eggs suitable for fertilisation.

If a sperm with damaged DNA fertilises an egg, the embryo may stop developing or develop genetic defects or later miscarry.

Unlike a woman, a man's sperm is renewed approximately every three months. However, there is an increasing number of cases where men have slowed or poor-quality sperm that are less able to conceive. There is also a rapid increase in various abnormalities, which can be genetic but also acquired during life. The quality of sperm begins to decline gradually from the age of 40.
Therefore, we offer high-quality and thorough sperm testing according to World Health Organization recommendations and complementary methods to select the best quality sperm to fertilise the egg. This increases the chances of a healthy embryo and successful treatment.

After fertilisation, we place the embryos in a special incubator in our laboratory. Our experienced embryologists closely monitor their development. As a standard procedure, they briefly remove the embryos from the incubator and examine them under a microscope.
If you want to give your embryos the best possible conditions for their development, you can choose modern time-lapse incubators. They allow you to continuously monitor the development of the embryos without having to remove them. As a result, the embryo is not exposed to external influences and mechanical manipulation. The EmbryoScope+ incubator is also equipped with artificial intelligence to help the embryologist decide which embryo is best to transfer to the uterus or freeze for future use.

Egg quality is one of the most critical factors determining the quality of the embryo. At 40, a woman has about 40% of genetically normal eggs; four years later, only 10-20%.
We use prolonged cultivation to select the best embryo, which we consider standard at Reprofit. We only transfer the embryo on the fifth day after fertilisation, i.e. at the blastocyst stage, because only a viable embryo reaches this stage.
However, the eggs' quality significantly affects the embryos' quality. Unfortunately, older eggs have a significantly increased risk of chromosomal defects in the embryo, which will only become apparent during embryo development. However, these chromosomal defects are not visible to the naked eye. This is why we also recommend preimplantation genetic testing PGT-A for aneuploidy. This allows us to detect chromosomal defects in the embryo before transferring it to the uterus. Selected embryos have a significantly higher chance of uterine implantation and healthy development. In addition, using PGT-A substantially reduces the time needed to achieve a successful pregnancy.

Once the embryo has been transferred to the uterus, the next stage is nesting. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why even a good-quality embryo may fail to implant. One of these is a breakdown in communication between the embryo and the endometrium. This is where EmbryoGlue can help, as it promotes proper communication between the embryo tissue and the endometrium, increasing the chances of the embryo being retained after transfer.

Our Science and Research Department has long been involved in several research projects on egg and embryo development in cooperation with renowned Czech and foreign institutions. The results of their research have been published, for example, in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communication. We then translate these findings into our clinical practice.