Long Luteal phase

[OnNaturesCourse]

Any experience with it? Not long been tracking4 in prep for TTC but it seems I'm averaging at a 33 day cycle, ovulation around day 13/14 then having a 19/20 day luteal phase.

That sounds unlikely, unless you are on Clomid. Luteal phase over 16 days is incredibly rare otherwise. How are you tracking? Temperature?

Ovulation tests.

I know these show up 24-48 hours before ovulation, so I always keep that in mind.

But honestly it's usually that long.

Right, well ovulation tests show the pre-ovulation spike in hormones, but they don't tell you that you have actually ovulated. It's common for the body to have several trial runs where it revs up for ovulation but doesn't quite get there. Almost certainly, you will be actually ovulating 10-14 days before your period starts. You might find it useful to chart temperatures - if you do it consistently and carefully, you can really see what's going on.

When I was tracking my cycles previously I had 16 days ovulation to period - that was with ovulation sticks and temp tracking. (TTC #1)

Since birth my cycles are longer, but I definitely know roughly when I ovulate. I know it can take a few tries to actually ovulate - but I will keep getting ovulation symtoms until I do. Like I know I've ovulated when my crazy discharge and other symtoms go away.

You should start tracking temperature. That shows when you have actually ovulated rather than the LH surge prior to ovulation. It will give you the clearest picture

It didn't always with me. I find testing much more accurate. I test for about 10-14 days so I can see surges and if its been successful.

Back to the point in hand, I have a long luteal phase - does anyone else and could it effect my TTC journey?

I'm a health researcher and I've just had a quick look at the research on luteal phase length and conception. Mostly, researchers discount data from cycles which appear to have a luteal phase of >17 days as being too unreliable to include as there is a high chance that the observation was either incorrectly recorded, an anovulatory cycle, or a pregnancy which didn't last. I appreciate that this is not helpful if you feel sure that a genuine long luteal phase is what's happening to you. There are some outliers where the luteal phase is longer and nothing to suggest that it reduces your fertility. You might be interested in this huge research study, which looked at 600,000 cycles from people using fertility apps with confirmed ovulation. I've attached a graph from the supplementary materials for the paper, which shows how the length of luteal phases varied across three large studies.

I cannot see any reason why a long luteal phase would be a problem, other than the difficulty in accurately identifying ovulation. The endometrium should be thick and a pregnancy would have time to implant. The research focus is on short luteal phases and the impact that has on fertility.One study I found looking at luteal phase lengths found that the hormonal changes in the first third of the phase can involve slow luteinization for some women, which means that this section lasts longer. However, there was no suggestion that this would cause a problem with fertility - it was just describing one type of hormonal profile.

Hope that is of some interest. If you have plenty of ovulation test sticks then it might be interesting to keep testing every other day to see how long your luteinising hormone spike lasts?

To illustrate how difficult it is to pinpoint things via the surge in luteinising hormone - this 2013 study found that "Overall, only 31/113 cycles (27.4%) had the classic LH pattern". The others had multiple LH spikes, with ovulation often occuring several days after the first spike, and some of them had multiple spikes but still no ovulation. All very interesting. I think the only scenario you'd need to be concerned about is the 'Luteinised unruptured follicle' that they mention here, ie when you've had the LH surge but ovulation doesn't actually happen. If you're sure that ovulation does actually happen, eg getting clear CM changes, then chances are you're going to have no problems at all

Thank you.

I've been testing daily since my last period finished, and on CD 12 I had a faint line on the test and by night it was a strong positive which continued into CD13 morning but by night had started to lighten. Its continued to lighten until today, CD 15 when I've had no line on the tests.

I'll continue to monitor daily to see what happens but my discharge has changed, and my ovulation pain felt on CD 13 and crazy discharge up to CD 12 has gone.

Just interesting to know how my body is working.

I know this is an older thread, but according to my clear blue tests I ovulated 3rd july, it’s now 22nd July and AF still hasn’t appeared. I did a test last Saturday, then again on Monday and both negative. I would assume that if I was pregnant they would have been positive at least by Monday!
Everyone says the only way to know for sure if I’ve ovulated is to test my bbt, but that’s impossible due to my work shifts, so I don’t know what to do 😂 please help

Bump, please help 😂