Advice please

[CIng]

I am a little overwhelmed by the question of how to choose a fertility clinic in London for probable IVF. I have reviewed stats and narrowed it down to a shortlist of under 10. But there are still so many options - and online reviews of each range from very positive to quite negative. I’m 39 and only started trying recently (for various life-related reasons). I did conceive once within six months but sadly miscarried at ten weeks which took a while to resolve. AMH is c.5.3 (which I understand is low) and FSH is c.8.5. So time is not on my side.

Do any clinics have particular reputations for focussing on or being good with patients who are at the older end of the spectrum and/or have low AMH? Is there anything in particular I should look out for or think about in my scenario? Any advice welcome - my sense from reading this page is that the Mumsnet community is much more experienced than me in these topics and most people seem very helpful. Thanks so much.

Hi I’m not I. London but we based it on

• Sucess rates in our age bracket
• NOT using natural IVF (ask me if you want more details as to why I don’t think it’s good)
• Being able to do ICSI
• Specific to us maybe but the NHS staff who we’d seen pre going for IVF actually all worked at the same private clinic so that helped us pick that one too

xxx

Thanks @Renisenb. Good tips. I have never even heard of natural IVF! Does ICSI have better chances of success in older women?

Not sure about ICSI for age as I’m under 35, we had it for poor sperm morphology, so it may not be a factor for you xx

Ah ok, thanks @Renisenb. I hope treatment went well for you xxx

We went for create St Paul’s after two failed nhs rounds on highest stims (very low response). Create started us on mild ivf (mid range stims) which weirdly made a lot more eggs (but no blasts) then one round natural modified (very low stims) that produced one egg, one blast, one viable pregnancy. (Very low amh, also had two spontaneous pregs with mcs, one was ectopic). I’ll never know if the change in protocol was the reason for success (or just pure luck/ increased protein intake) as you can see from the other poster, low stims might mean less success in others.

best of luck deciding. sounds like you’re organised!

@aLogLadyThanks for your reply. So pleased that you had success. I am curious as to your comment as to protein intake - does increasing protein intake increase the chances of success?

@CIng i was vegetarian for 15+ years, and was randomly looking over some blood tests and saw that my protein was low (its not actually a result of protein, but a lack of something I can’t remember the name of that indicates you’re liver isn’t processing a normal amount of protein). The nurse at create who was also a dietician had previously mentioned to up protein intake, and I realised two cycles in that I wasn’t even at normal levels, so started eating meat about 4 months before my last cycle. Again, potentially just luck, or the low doses, or all three, but something worked significantly better than it had been doing (from no blasts to 4AB that has worked)

And (I should add!) I was a protein conscious vegetarian, lentils, tofu etc, but all whole foods no supplements.

Evewell ❤️

@aLogLadySO interesting. I’m also veggie. Not sure I can face eating meat after all these years though.

@PlanBFertility26Thanks! Are you a patient of The Evewell and if so would you recommend the clinic?

@CIng it was a weird transition. I mean think of all the vegetarians in the world, it’s def not a cause of fertility issues or we’d know, but I had to address being deficient and my stomach wasn’t big enough to eat the amount of lentils that equates to a small portion of chicken! I’m eating meat in pregnancy as I want readily available amino acids required for building life, but I am looking forward to going back!

weirdly in London I had to walk through a park that had free roaming cattle to get to the train station, and obvs it was difficult to pretend to the cows I wasn’t a threat as I walked by them making calming noises 😬

@aLogLadyThat’s very interesting and makes me think I may need to revisit this too. I did laugh at your coss story!