Quick donor egg quality question - please answer if you've used DE.

[Weeseyannabox]

Hi everyone.
Thanks for reading this. Small question, and possibly a bit silly 'cos it seems obvious, but if you get, say, 3 blastocysts from 1 donor, and the 1st one fails but they dunno why, it could be egg quality, couldn't it? Which means the other 2 could fail too?! I'm about to start DE IVF with a clinic in Portugal but they don't do PGTA on donor egg embryos. I hope they at least do a rating. Anyway, if you can give me your thoughts on the above question, please do - if donor egg quality is rubbish for 1, it's probably rubbish across the board, isn't it?

There are lots of reasons why a transfer may fail, one of which is egg quality. In that respect there is no difference between donor or your own eggs. However, we know that the younger the donor etc. the better the chances, which is why people use donors.

Even PGT-A testing won’t guarantee you anything. An embryo found to have an issue through testing doesn’t mean that it was due to the egg, or - even if it was - that there is something wrong with the donor’s eggs generally.

I had PGT-A testing of two embryos from a cycle. One was poor and destroyed. The other is an almost 1 year old baby boy now.

Having gone through several cycles I can say that egg quality is only one factor. I naively assumed using DE would be a slam dunk but it wasn’t. Nevertheless my twins are now 15 and it was more than worth all of the effort. I wish you the best of luck. Stay with the program — you’ll get there.

Our 6AA DE blast failed to implant but my lining thickness wasn't great. Next time we added estrogen patches from the start as well as prednisoline, and the 5AA that we transferred stuck. I don't think you can assume that the failed transfer means something negative about the rest of the embryos given the amount of variables! I had two euploid embryos that also didn't implant and I have no idea why.

Grading would be helpful though, can you ask about that? Keep the faith!

@loulamay @CuriousGeorge80 @Fifisneighbor Thank you all very much.

It’s like with all eggs though- one could be fine, another not so. We got 3 blasts- one didn’t go much further. The other two are our twins!

@gettingolderbutcooler Thanks a million ;)

A percentage of all embryos, at any age, will be aneuploid. It certainly doesn't mean if one has aneuploidy all the others will too, its normal to have some that aren't. Donors are under 35, when about 30-40% are chromosomally abnormal. PGTa is only looking for the right number of chromosomes, it can't pick up other issues anyway.

About 40% of conception is down to other things, like the uterine environment and woman's hormones. Only 60-70% of the highest quality euploid embryos implant too, success rates are around 90-95% after 3 embryo transfers if there are no other issues. There's just no way you can have one fail and say it was an egg issue, or that there was any issue, it's normal human reproduction to take a few tries.

I used Portugal and they provided a rating for all our DE blastocysts. One failing doesn't mean all will. Feel free to pm me.

It’s only like 30-50% chance that each transfer will result in a pregnancy even with donor eggs. It takes some people a few tries even with a donor embryo. We have four good quality donor egg embryos and I hope to get two babies from it. Could be more, could be less. It’s all a gamble. Sperm quality makes a difference. Womb conditions make a difference. Random chance makes a difference.