Conceiving and age
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Fertility Specialist Kari Sproul, MD, explains how age affects a woman's likelihood of getting pregnant and what can be done to increase fertility
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So I think it’s really important for patients to know what their chances are to conceive just based on their age alone. I think patients a lot of times think it’s much higher than it really is.
When we’re in our twenties, if we have normal ovulation, open tubes and normal sperm, our chance of conceiving per moth is really only about 20-25%. When we get to our thirties that chance goes down to about 10% per moth and by the time we’re in our forties that chance is about 5% per month in patients who have been trying to conceive for the allotted time that they should.
For instance in someone who is under 35, that’s a year with normal cycles. Someone 35 and older, that’s 6 months. If they haven’t gotten pregnant in that time frame we know that really their chance of conceiving per month is now down to about 3% per month.
And that’s important to understand, because our goal of fertility treatment is to try to bring their chance of pregnancy back up to normal or to try to increase it over what it is at baseline. But in reality every month the chance of conceiving based just on our age alone is not that high.
Fertility Specialist Kari Sproul, MD, explains how age affects a woman's likelihood of getting pregnant and what can be done to increase fertility
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Kari Sproul, MDFertility Specialist
Kari Sproul is a Reproductive Endocrinologist and Infertility (REI) doctor in Los Angeles. She sees patients who have irregular menstrual cycles, as well as patients who are trying to conceive. She is married and has a 20-month-old son. In her spare time, she enjoys all outdoor activities. She also loves to run and recently completed her first triathlon.
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