Saturday, August 3, 2013

No fat chicks! Oh, wait...



Last year, I posted about the fact women who were told they could lose weight & magically get pregnant on their own after gastric bypass surgery actually didn't.  Another study appears to back up the claim that obesity does not reduce chances of IVF success:

"For the study, researchers looked at data of patients from five earlier studies (of women using their own eggs for IVF) conducted over the past decade along with data from 123 egg donor recipients from the Washington University Infertility and Reproductive Medicine Center...Most IVF programs have certain BMI restrictions in order to analyze whether a woman is fit to receive the treatment. According to Jungheim, these restrictions need to be re-examined as according to her, there is still a lot to learn about the obesity-pregnancy link... "We need to find out what specifically goes wrong in obese women who don't [get pregnant]. We think other factors besides BMI are involved."

Yes!  Other factors, like environmental ones, such as linking BPA (commonly found in plastics) to infertility, finding it may disrupt eggs from maturing properly:

"...exposed more than 350 immature eggs, which were left over from infertility procedures, to varying amounts of BPA in lab dishes. Only 35 percent of eggs exposed to the lowest levels of BPA had a normal number and configuration of chromosomes after they fully matured compared with 71 percent of those in a control group of eggs that weren’t exposed to BPA...Most of the eggs exposed to the highest levels of BPA failed to mature at all, and the rest had abnormal chromosomes."
  
Clearly more research on the causes of IF is needed


 

3 comments:

ADSchill said...

Good research and interesting finding. I understand why some obese women could have some issue if there bodies hormones are off...but IVF assists in regulating those hormones, so it all seems wonky to me. I remember my first MFM telling me I could lose some weight, get rid of my PCOS and conceive naturally if I wanted. After I was there to get some other tests run on my cardiac output and still in distress over the loss of my twins - classy.

Rebecca said...

BPA is everywhere and that is a fact that I wish could be quickly resolved.

Unknown said...

I'm blaming infertility on everything we have done to our food. Hormones, preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, BPA, GMO's, pesticdes, etc. I also blame obesity on all those things and more. We have royally screwed our planet and all of us in it, and I don't know if I will live to see it get better :(