So what is IVM is the question that I had when I saw a new fertility article come across my Google alerts today. So naturally I had to do some reading on this new infertility technique and how it differs from what we all know as IVF.

Well IVM as they call it stands for in-vitro maturation. The process as I understand it based on the research that I did today is that the fertility clinic will collect immature eggs from the patient and mature them in a lab with a small dose of hormones in a cultured medium. Then they do the traditional ICSI procedure to fertilize the now mature eggs and what ever embryos they get from that procedure are then transferred back to the womb.

So what’s the big deal you might be wondering? Well with the IVM procedure the infertility clinic and the patient do not go through the expensive process of bombarding the patient with a bunch of fertility drugs to mature the egg inside the uterus. They are taking it out early in the stages of when the eggs are released and maturing them in a lab somewhere.

One of the main plus sides that I have read about this procedure so far is the fact that it is cheaper of course but also eliminates the risk of ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome (OHSS) which can be fatal.

Those are some great upsides to this procedure but this is still a relatively new process that does not have a lot of clinical backing and there does not seem to be a lot records or statistics on the success rates or more importantly on the health of children that have been born through this procedure. So I would not get your hopes up to quickly on this IVM as it seems to be in the very new category of infertility procedures so I would stick to a wait and see attitude with this IVM for quite a while.

Here are a couple of links to some of the IVM information that I was able to find. This first link is the original article about IVM and this second link seems to back up what the news post about the IVM procedure is all about.