News and Articles

Other Professional Sites

British Acupuncture Council:
www.acupuncture.org.uk

Muirhead Roberts Physiotherapy Practice:
www.mrphysiotherapy.co.uk

Fertility Websites

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority:

The Authority is the UK's independent regulator overseeing the use of gametes and embryos in fertility treatment and research.

The HFEA licenses centres carrying out In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), other assisted conception procedures and human embryo research, and provides a range of detailed information for patients, professionals, the public and Government.
www.hfea.gov.uk

Integrative Health Solutions:

Headed by Dr Michael Culp, IHS offers a number of laboratory tests.
www.ihs.eu.com

Foresight:

Foresight has put together a thoroughly researched pre-conception programme, which identifies and addresses various areas of concern in the health in any pair of prospective parents. The objective is to optimise the health of both prospective parents well before conception occurs so that a pregnancy can be started with a normal, strong sperm and ova and the embryo can implant and develop under optimum conditions in a healthy uterus, with no danger of damage from nutritional deficiency, toxins or disease.
www.foresight-preconception.org.uk

The Nutri Centre:

Supplier of nutritional products, holistic remedies, health supplements.
www.nutricentre.com

Babylist:

All things baby...
www.babylist.co.uk

Fertility downloads

Basal Body Temperature Chart (normal temp range) as PDF

Research and Articles

Article, 21st January 2009

Acupuncture can help people who suffer from headaches and migraines according to a review of medical studies.

Scientists working for the Cochrane Collaboration, which publishes ‘gold standard’ reviews on the effectiveness of medical treatments, confirmed the beneficial effect of acupuncture after analysing 33 studies involving nearly 7,000 patients.

Led by Klaus Linde from the Technical University, Munich, Cochrane reviewed published evidence for acupuncture as a treatment for tension headaches and migraines. Trials found many experienced fewer headaches after receiving acupuncture. Linde said that the results suggest acupuncture could be given to patients who do not wish to take drugs, but that more research was needed.

Article, 10th November 2008

A new technique for screening embryos for genetic defects during IVF more than doubles the chances that the embryo will implant in the mother’s womb, according to a pilot study by UK and US researchers.

The method, which has several advantages over an existing screening technique, led to established pregnancies – meaning that foetal heartbeat was detected using ultrasound – in 78% of the 23 women who underwent the treatment. Genetic screening involves testing embryos during in-vitro fertilisation for abnormal chromosomes that could prevent the embryos from being carried to term.

Fertility doctors using the current technique take one or two cells at day three of the embryo’s development, when it has 8 cells. Once healthy embryos have been selected they are implanted back into the patient’s uterus. The technique, fluorescent in situ hybridisation, is controversial, with some studies suggesting that it provides no benefit or is counter productive. The long-term effects of manipulating the embryos are unknown.

The new technique called comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) allows doctors to remove cells from the embryo at a later stage, when it is five days old and has more than 100 cells. Removing cells at this stage should be less damaging, and by analysing 5 or 6 cells the clinician can be more confident that the genetic abnormality exists in the whole embryo, and not just a few cells. The researcher who has developed the new technique is planning to offer it in the UK for about £2000 on top of the IVF fee and around the same as standard screening techniques.

‘The pregnancy rates we’ve got so far are absolutely phenomenal,’ said Dr Dagan Wells at Oxford University and Reprogenetics UK who led the study. ‘We’re ready to begin a trial in the UK and we have a couple of licence applications in to the HFEA to start offering CGH to patients.’ The HFEA is the UK’s regulator of fertility clinics.

Dr Mandy Katz-Jaffe at the Colorado Centre for Reproductive Medicine near Denver, who is part of the team, said: ‘The patients who are going through this knew this was their last chance of conceiving without going for donor eggs. They have a poor prognosis, with multiple failed cycles. The effect on those patients who have conceived has been beyond anything I can describe.’ Wells’s team tested the CGH method in 23 women aged 30-42 and transferred 50 embryos. After screening and embryo transfer, 20 of the women became pregnant (foetal heartbeat confirmed by ultrasound). Two suffered miscarriage in the first three months, two have already given birth and for more due by the end of 2008.

Article, November 11th 2008

Using frozen rather than freshly collected embryos during IVF treatment reduces the risk of stillbirth and premature delivery according to three separate studies published yesterday.

The findings from the US, Finland and Australia suggest the act of stimulating a woman’s ovaries with powerful drugs and then collecting the extra eggs she produces temporarily disrupts any IVF attempt conducted shortly afterwards

The researchers said the results argue for more IVF cycles to be completed using frozen embryos which goes against current practice. The most recently available UK figures show that in 2006, 29,304 patients under 35 received IVF treatment cycles using fresh embryos, while 6,894 were treated with frozen cycles. The new data suggests this preponderance of fresh cycles puts IVF babies at higher risk of being born prematurely and underweight or dying soon after birth.

The new data poses a dilemma for IVF clinics, because fresh cycles tend to be more successful at resulting in pregnancies – 31% of fresh cycles in 2006 for under 35s resulted in birth compared with 20.1% for frozen cycles.
‘Frozen embryo transfers are not as successful as fresh ones in terms of getting a pregnancy. So it may be that we have to balance the health of children against chances of success,’ said Dr Allan Pacey from the University of Sheffield who is secretary of the British Fertility Society. ‘In a normal IVF cycle patients have their embryo transfer while the uterus is still affected by the drugs they take to stimulate the ovaries. This allows the patient’s body to get rid of the drugs and to grow a new endometrial lining,’ said Dr Mandy Katz-Jaffe of the Colorado Centre for Reproductive Medicine.

In the Australian study a team led by Prof Gordon Baker at the Royal Women’s hospital in Melbourne analysed data from all Melbourne’s fertility centres collected between 2001 and 2004. They found 469 (11%) of the 4279 attempts using fresh embryos resulted in babies with a low birth weight (less than 2.5kg) compared with 163 (6.5%) of the 2150 IVF cycles using frozen embryos. Similarly the fresh cycles has a higher proportion of babies dying withion 28 days (1.87% to 1.16%) and more pre-term births (12.3% to 9.4%) – defining pre-term as earlier than 37 weeks.

‘These results suggest that adverse birth outcomes of assisted reproductive therapy are associated with fresh embryo transfers,’ the authors wrote.

Using frozen embryos also has benefits for the mother. One risk posed by drugs used to stimulate the ovaries is a condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which can be fatal in rare cases. At present, if patients begin to develop symptoms, fertility doctors typically abandon an IVF attempt using fresh embryos because the hormonal disruption can make the OHSS worse.

Older articles/research (view as pdf)

Acupuncture and Angina

Acupuncture • Richard Jackson MSc MBAcC LicAc

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