It is a rollercoaster of emotional extremes that will be familiar to many who have gone through IVF treatment: hope and joy turns to despair and back again. This is especially true for women over 35, the age when IVF success rates decline steeply and for whom the only real way to improve the odds is to keep trying.
While there has been huge progress in IVF in the past decades, including the advent of genetic testing, egg freezing and techniques to overcome male infertility, the primary cause of age-related female infertility – egg quality – has not been directly addressed.
