Low rate of fertilisation - has anything worked for you?

[FrostedFlake]

Hi I’m looking for some advice, my husband and I have been trying to conceive for a while and after a cancelled IVF with ICSI cycle last year, we managed to go again in Jan of this year but unfortunately it needed in chemical pregnancy. However we are ready to go again!
We managed to get 13 eggs however only 4 of them fertilised and we only got one day 5 blastocyst. the specialist has recommended doing DNA fragmentation testing as well as artificial oocyte activation.
Have any of you experience low rate of egg fertilisation and what was your approach? Would love to hear any advice or what has/has not worked. Thank you xx

Hey, it only takes one good one!
I got 17 eggs, 8 fertilised and only 2 made it to day 5, one good quality and one poor quality.
I had the good quality transferred and he's now 16 months old!
Have you had the transfer yet? X

Thank you @decor340 ! I was really hoping the one we had in the last cycle was the one but unfortunately I miscarried and we have to start another round of IVF. Hopefully we will get at least one but wanted to see if there’s anything to side the fertilisation rate so that we might have better changes.

@FrostedFlake I’m in the same boat. We had a fertilisation rate of 33% with ICSI last time and the only embryo that made it was not good quality.

DH had sperm test, it was for oxidative stress, which is a cause of DNA frag (basically a much cheaper test at our clinic but doesn’t confirm DNA frag, just says if it’s likely). Treated the same as in use better supplements (proxeed) etc. Anyways that came back positive so we’ve had a 3 month wait while he takes proxeed.

Our next round we’ll be using AOA and zymot chip. Our clinic don’t do IMSI but have the zymot chip which means the sperm they use is selected differently (they have to swim through this mesh thing I think).

Won’t start next round until June, but I’m happy we’re trying something different. We’re officially unexplained but it looks like we have a male factor issue that wasn’t picked up on standard SA.

Hi @Lauralozzle & @FrostedFlake sorry to jump in but I just wanted to ask how you’re both getting on? We had a similarly awful fertilisation rate with icsi and failed round. We’ve also found out we have high dna sperm fragmentation to add to the mix. We’re just about to start our next round with picsi and imsi and really hoping something helps!

@Ttc91 Still waiting to start our next round as I’ve had a bit of a thyroid nightmare. Hopefully we’ll be good to go next month though.

@Ttc91 I’m in the same boat as Laura and waiting to start our next cycle. We haven’t done fragmentation testing but going with AOA this time around.

Would you mind me asking what PICSI & IMSI are?

@FrostedFlake @Lauralozzle Good luck to you both in your upcoming cycles!! I’m also adding in AOA this time too and hoping it might help. So I think picsi is a way of pre-selecting sperm which are likely to be more normal. imsi is like icsi but with a much more powerful microscope so they can see more detail (I think!). Fingers crossed something helps!?