Is IVF 100% Successful?

Have you been advised to do IVF and been told that you’ll for sure get pregnant? Today we’re talking about just how effective IVF treatment is.

How successful is IVF, really?

Patients come to The Fertility Expert all the time believing that IVF treatment has a 100% success rate, when – in fact – this is just not true. Unfortunately, they come to us with this belief in the middle of their IVF treatment or after they’ve just finished an IVF cycle and it wasn’t successful for them.

Well let’s start out with some basic common knowledge: nothing in life is ever 100% successful. If that fact was somehow different for IVF, then everyone would be doing it and the queues would be out of the doors.

While many IVF clinics do already have queues going out of the doors, the reality is that the success rates for IVF treatment widely vary for several reasons. The main ones are age, condition, clinic and the clinic location.

Your age, and using your own eggs, are important IVF factors to consider. Women under the age of 35 typically have higher IVF success rates while women over the age of 35, with fewer eggs or eggs of lower quality, have reduced chances of IVF success.

Male and female infertility conditions also impact IVF success rates. It’s important to know that IVF success factors are dependent on ovulation. If you have a condition that requires you to take a lot of ovarian stimulation drugs, this may lower pregnancy rates and reduce success with IVF.

The clinic you choose to undergo the IVF treatment can also greatly affect your success rate. Important factors to consider when choosing an IVF clinic are the training of staff, qualifications held by the staff, their birth rates, and the types of patients usually accepted at their clinic.

Success rates of IVF in the US

Typically, what we’re seeing right now in the United States are success rates somewhere between 40 and 50% (for IVF with frozen embryo transfers).

Often those numbers are less on average, with statistics that are somewhere between 25% to 35%.

Nothing is created equal. Not all clinics, not any of us, and certainly not the success rates of IVF. So it’s important to go into treatment with eyes wide open and a good understanding of what to expect, so as not to be drastically disappointed when going through the process and it not being successful the first time around.

Hopefully, you’ll fall into the percentage that is lucky and successful on the first time, but the odds are not in your favor. That’s why I want all of my patients to go into their next IVF cycle understanding and being prepared for it to take more than one cycle to be successful because that’s what we see on average across the board.