Should extended blastocyst culture include Day 7?

I-7: Introducing Blastocyst Culture and Transfer into Clinical Practice

Blastocyst culture: facts and fiction.

The use of sequential media has made extended culture and transfer of blastocysts feasible for human IVF. Embryo transfer on day 5 has been claimed to result in higher implantation rates than transfer on day 3, on the basis of retrospective comparative studies. This is not supported convincingly, however, in randomized controlled trials published to date. Blastocyst culture imposes additional r...

Inm-1: Blastocyst Culture: Advantages and Disadvantages

Both cleavage-stage and blastocyst-stage embryo transfer policieshave advantages and drawbacks.Potential advantages of blastocyst culture and transfer in human IVF include: i. synchronization of the embryo with the female tract leading to increasedimplantation rates; thereby, reducing the need for multipleembryo transfers, ii. assessment of viability of an embryobefore transfer. This can be ach...

I-13: Blastocyst Culture and Freezing

It should now be beyond doubt that blastocyst culture results in better pregnancy rate (PR). This calls for fewer embryos to be transferred, and indeed blastocyst culture is of most value when the intention is to put back one embryo at a time. The PR with one top-grade blastocyst is 45-65% in different studies. If two top-grade blastocysts are transferred, the PR usually does not differ, but th...

Non-Invasive Prediction of Blastocyst Formation by Day Three Embryo Culture Medium Mass Spectrometry Lipid Fingerprinting.

OBJECTIVE To identify lipid markers of blastocyst formation by day three culture medium mass spectrometry (MS) fingerprinting. METHODS For this study, 50 embryo samples from culture media were harvested on day three, from patients undergoing embryo transfers on day five. Samples were split into groups based on their degree of expansion and hatching status on day five (Complete-Blastocyst, n=2...