Fecundity

It is clear that women’s fecundity, or fertility, decreases with increasing age. By the age of 35, a woman has half the chance of becoming pregnant than a 25-year-old. An assessment of the ovarian capacity for fertility can be accomplished with some simple tests. These tests do not have a high sensitivity or a high specificity. An abnormal test is associated with a poor pregnancy rate but a normal test does not guarantee a successful outcome. The most commonly used test for ovarian reserve is to measure follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and the hormone estradiol on day 3 of a menstrual cycle. A more sensitive test is to measure a day 3 FSH and estradiol, followed by ovarian stimulation with the medication clomiphene citrate 100 mg from days 5 to 9 of the cycle. Another serum FSH is performed on day 10, after completion of the clomiphene citrate. An elevated serum FSH (generally 12 IU/L, but this varies according to the lab) or estradiol (greater than 80 pg/mL) is associated with a... Access this chapter Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Suggested Reading Clark, A. M., Thornley, B., Tomlinson, L., Galletley, C., & Norman, R. J. (1998). Weight loss in obese infertile women results in improvement in reproductive outcome for all forms of fertility treatment. Human Reproduction, 13, 1502–1505. Falcone, T., Goldberg, J. M., & Miller, K. F. (1996). Endometriosis: Medical and surgical intervention. Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology, 8, 178–183. Hatch, E. E., & Bracken, M. B. (1993). Association of delayed conception with caffeine consumption. American Journal of Epidemiology, 138, 1082–1092. Legro, R. S., Finegood, D., & Dunaif, A. (1998). A fasting glucose to insulin ratio is a useful measure of insulin sensitivity in women with polycystic ovary syndrome. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 83, 2694–2698. Pagidas, K., Falcone, T., Hemmings, R., & Miron, R. (1996). Comparison of surgical treatment of moderate (stage iii) and severe (stage iv) endometriosis-related infertility with IVF_ET. Fertility and Sterility, 65, 791–795. Rowe, P., Comhaire, F., Hargreave, T. B., & Mahmoud, A. M. (Eds.). (2000). WHO manual for the standardized investigation, diagnosis and management of the infertile male. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sharara, F. L., Scott, R. T., Jr., & Seifer, D. B. (1998). The detection of diminished ovarian reserve in infertile women. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 179, 804–812. Rights and permissions Copyright information © 2004 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers About this entry Cite this entry Falcone, T., Sharma, R. (2004). Fecundity. In: Encyclopedia of Women’s Health. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48113-0_158 Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48113-0_158 Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA Print ISBN: 978-0-306-48073-7 Online ISBN: 978-0-306-48113-0 eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive Keywords These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.