Why did my IVF cycle fail doctor?

October 30, 2023 Reviewed by Dr Hameed Ibrahim Khokar

Originally posted 2021-09-29 10:12:13.

When an IVF cycle fails, patients are not happy and demand an explanation. This is especially true when the IVF cycle was perfect, and a top-quality blastocyst was transferred smoothly into a receptive uterus, and the doctor was very optimistic about the chances of the patient getting pregnant at the time of embryo transfer.

When the IVF cycle fails, patients feel cheated and they want answers. The doctor is therefore forced into creating answers, even though the truth is that medical science is not capable of answering this basic question.

To ease the patient, the standard response is to, order an additional battery of expensive tests, such as the ERA ( endometrial receptivity assay), and PGT ( embryo biopsy), because patients believe that the more tests the doctor orders, the more thorough and careful he is.

However, the sad reality is that none of these tests actually help to improve pregnancy rates – and they often reduce them a dirty little secret which doctors don’t share, because they make money by ordering these tests.

More tests are really not the answer, and this is because embryo implantation is still a complex biological process, which we don’t have the tools to understand or control.

This is why the answers to all the additional tests are misleading. An honest answer would be We don’t know why perfect IVF cycles fail just like we don’t know why they succeed, and we are terrible at predicting the outcome of an individual IVF cycle.

Patients need to be realistic and understand that there are lots of things that modern reproductive medicine still can’t control, which is why the success rate for IVF is poor.