BACKGROUND Intact frozen-thawed embryos have a greater potential than damaged embryos to establish successful pregnancies. This study aimed to determine whether elevated concentrations of sucrose during freezing would increase the proportion of patients with ≥ 50% of embryos intact after thawing (primary outcome), and improve clinical outcome. METHODS In a two arm, parallel group, pragmatic t...

A 36 year old patient underwent in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer. Three embryos were transferred to her uterus and eight spare embryos were cryopreserved. The patient conceived a quadruplet pregnancy and delivered two boys and two identical twin girls by Caesarean section at 30 weeks gestation. The couple subsequently donated their cryopreserved embryos to the embryo donation pr...

BACKGROUND Assisted hatching (AH) is a manipulation of zona pellucida aiming to facilitate embryo implantation. METHODS Systematic review and meta-analysis of medical literature was used to evaluate the effect of AH on assisted reproduction outcomes: clinical pregnancy, live birth, multiple pregnancy and miscarriage. Additional analysis was performed in these subgroups: (i) fresh embryos tran...

Objective This study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of laser-assisted hatching (LAH) and various vitrification times for embryonic development and blastocyst cell numbers. Methods First, 2-cell and 8-cell embryos were collected by flushing out the oviducts. In the control groups, they were vitrified for 8 or 10 minutes without LAH. The LAH groups underwent quarter laser zona thinni...

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of cryopreservation on 55 embryos which had one blastomere biopsied for preimplantation genetic diagnosis of aneuploidy before freezing. The thawing outcome was compared to that obtained in 94 embryos which derived from our conventional freezing programme in patients with comparable characteristics who were treated in the same period. ...