Embryo banking - how many is enough?

[Dexy007]

Hi everyone

I wondered if anyone's fertility specialist has told you how many Day 5 blasts / embryos are (statistically) likely to be enough to have two successful pregnancies later down the track?

There is a lot of info on success rates and a lot of info on how many eggs you should freeze but I can't find a lot of info on how many embryos are likely to result in a family of four.

I know absolutely nothing is guaranteed, we might have implantation failure, all our blasts might be poor quality (we haven't had them tested yet). I'm just asking for very vague guidance / probabilities.

Thank you in advance.

Hello, the guidance is often 3X tested blastocysts per baby you want. Research suggests that 93% of women will take home a baby after up to three transfers of euploid embryos. Some people get lucky and get two babies from two consecutively transferred embryos, and some are less lucky and it takes more transfers. Wishing you all the best!

Agree with previous poster - statistically you need to aim for x3 blastocysts per healthy baby. But until you start IVF you have no idea of knowing whether that is going to be realistic. When I was embryo banking my target was just a certain number of blastocysts because my fertilisation rate and blastocyst rate was low per cycle. One thing to consider though is if you want 3 children and so bank 9 blastocysts and you are lucky enough to have healthy babies from The first 3 transfers then that would leave you 6 frozen that you'd then have to dispose/destroy.

I have 2 left frozen and have very complicated feelings about what to do with them

As others have said 3 euploids per baby. I wanted 2 children so aimed for 6! But 3 rounds in, turns out we never get more than 2 blasts per round to test no matter how many eggs or fertilisations. You don’t know until you try…

It also turns out that only 1/5 of our frosties is euploid. One other mosaic. So I have massively revised down my expectations and would be amazed if I got any more transferrable embryos than the 2 I have tbh. I’m giving it 1-2 more retrievals then I am done and transferring whatever we have. Not hopeful a baby will happen any more…

So banking embryos only works if you have embryos to bank. At least we won’t face the heartache of destroying good ones, although we do have 3 abnormals to bin
so far.

Thanks so much for the thoughts, that's really helpful. We got 4 x day 5 embryos in the first round but as I said, no idea of quality yet. No testing done.

Hoping to start round two today.

If we can, Id like to aim for 9 x