IVF success, sudden deafness, and improving stroke research

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Health Report 28 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 17 hours ago

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What is the overall focus of today’s Health Report episode?

Unknown 0:01

This is an ABC podcast.

James Bullen 0:06

Hello and welcome to The Health Report with me, James Bullen. Today, a concerning medical condition that can happen without warning.

Helen 0:13

She had a look of horror on her face when I said this has suddenly come on and she said this is really serious. Then she said you need to get yourself to the emergency room at the hospital as soon as possible.

James Bullen 0:24

and unplugging the bottleneck for stroke drug treatments. But first, infertility affects one in six Australian couples, and for those with the means to use IVF, many will know the pain of unsuccessful rounds of treatment. The chances of taking home a baby from IVF are fairly modest, but new data shows that overall, success rates are slowly improving. The latest report from the Australia and New Zealand Assisted Reproduction Database, or ANZARD, shows almost 16,000 babies were born as a result of IVF in 2017, the highest number on record. But while IVF success rates are generally getting better, knowing how individual clinics compare isn't easy. ABC health reporter Olivia Willis has been looking into this, and she joins me now.

James Bullen 1:06

Hi, Liv.

Olivia Willis 1:06

Hi,

James Bullen 1:07

James. Let's start with this latest Anzard report. This is data that's collected from all IVF clinics across Australia and New Zealand, and they're particularly looking at treatment outcomes.

Olivia Willis 1:16

Yeah, that's exactly right. So basically it's a database that's been running since about 2004. It's funded by the Fertility Society of Australia, which is the industry's peak body, and it's run by the University of New South Wales. And so basically all clinics, IVF clinics across the country, they're required to submit their data. So that's rates of pregnancies and live births. from IVF and then UNSW compiles that into an annual report and it basically gives us a picture kind of at a national level of how we're tracking in terms of IVF success and I guess the efficacy of treatment.

James Bullen 1:48

And their latest report, which is 2017 data, that shows an improving success rate.

Olivia Willis 1:53

Yeah, that's right. So, overall success rates are getting better, as you say, and they've gradually been improving kind of over the last decade or so. And so, we know that if you start IVF today, you're certainly more likely to take home a baby than you would have been even five or ten years ago. The 2017 data shows that overall the birth rate per IVF cycle was a little over 21%. So it's a slight increase on the previous year. And basically it means that for every 100 treatment cycles that are started with the intention of pregnancy, so not just to freeze eggs, 21 babies are born of every 100. And that figure increases to about 34% when we look at it in terms of the cumulative rate of IVF success. So in other words, if women have about a 34% chance of taking home a baby at the end of a complete IVF cycle.

Olivia Willis 2:42

So that can involve several embryo transfers from a single kind of egg collection.

James Bullen 2:48

And why are we seeing this increase? Is it just because there's more rounds of IVF that are being undertaken or because of improvements in IVF technology?

Olivia Willis 2:55

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a combination of both, really. So the number of cycles that were undertaken in 2017 only went up really by a pretty small amount. It was, I think, about 1%. But there's been a larger increase kind of proportionally in the number of babies born.

How have IVF success rates changed according to the ANZARD report?

Olivia Willis 3:10

And so that really comes down to the increasing use of frozen embryo transfers instead of fresh ones, which leads to a higher success rate in terms of live births. And then in addition to that, there's been an increase in the use of what they call pre-implantation genetic testing. So more and more IVF specialists are genetically testing the embryos before they're inserted into the womb. And the idea there is basically to screen out chromosomally abnormal embryos and make sure that the embryos they do transfer kind of have the best shot of successfully implanting.

James Bullen 3:43

Right. And when we talk about IVF success, age is obviously a really critical factor. What did the ANZARD report find in terms of age-related IVF success?

Olivia Willis 3:52

Well, you're right.