Help understanding what ‘one cycle’ of IVF/ICSI means

[Wildflower88]

Hi All,

This is my first ever thread so hopefully I’ve posted correctly.

My husband and I have been referred to our local hospital for fertility investigation and it is expected that we will be recommended IVF with ICSI.

I have spoken to a few local treatment centres to help us understand exactly what constitutes ONE CYCLE of IVF (as our NHS only provide 2) and both places have advised differently regarding how many of your collected eggs/embryos are used per cycle.

Clinic 1 (Hewitt Fertility Centre in Knutsford) have said that we can use all of our collected eggs/embryos from the egg collection (fresh/frozen) as part of one cycle, so effectively if we get 15 eggs and 10 become embryos we will be able to implant all of them (unless we have a live birth occur) before the cycle ends.

However Clinic 2 (Care Fertility Manchester) have advised that there will only be one embryo implant per cycle so if your first implant fails that’s the end of your cycle regardless of how many additional eggs/embryos were retrieved.

I’d be really grateful if anyone could share their experience/knowledge on this as the different responses have left us rather confused.

Additionally if anyone has used Embryoscope (sometimes called caremap) during their IVF/ICSI cycle and has any thoughts on how worthwhile it was I’d love to hear them as we’ve just found out that it is only available at one of the clinics we are considering for NHS patients (and you can’t just pay extra for it) and I’m quite keen to have it however unfortunately the offering clinic has considerably low ICSI success rates which may of course be a big factor if that is what our diagnosis recommends.

Thanks all x

It sounds like clinic 1 is talking about one cycle of IVF & clinic 2 is talking about your monthly cycle. Has clinic 2 actually specified that they will put a maximum of one embryo per IVF cycle? That cannot be right, surely? We’ve had five cycles/rounds of IVF although admittedly not in the uk. Each round or cycle included all the treatment, egg collection and embryo transfers of embryo’s from that particular cycle. The cycle was deemed to be finished when no embryo’s were left.
Hope that helps & good luck!

Thank you for responding! That’s reassuring and what i was hoping someone would say as I did wonder what happened to the unused/frozen eggs if they couldn’t be used in that cycle. X

For the nhs is I would expect that one cycle includes one round of stimulation and egg collection, transfer of one embryo and possibly as many further transfers of frozen embryos as you have embryos left.

Definitely they won’t discard any leftover embryos unless you ask them to but there might be a charge for storage.

To confirm you will have to contact your clinic because it will probably vary.

The current advice is to only transfer one embryo at a time because transferring more than one doesn’t improve the live birth rate enough to be worth the increased risks involved with a multiple pregnancy.

I think it depends on each individual clinical care group - my area is definitely option 1 - 1 cycle includes the transfer of all frozen embryos - so if you get 10 blasts than you get 10 transfers

I would go with the clinic which has the best success rate for ICSI and getting embryos to blastocyst stage? To give you the maximum number of "free" goes? Ivf is a number game.

I have had the equivalent of embryoscope/care maps - each clinic calls it something different. There is clinical evidence that using it is better for blastocyst culturing as they don't have to be constantly taken out of their environment to be viewed under a microscope - the embryologists can also watch the time lapse back when deciding which ones to transfer first and are better able to pick one that looks healthier/better quality

I've heard that many Care clinics have a really good success rate but a friend of mine got 0 embryos to blast stage with her Care clinic. I would worry less about the "add ons" offered by each clinic and go with the one that's going to get you as many blasts as possible x