If you are considering IVF treatment, we understand that IVF success rates are important to you. It is important to understand what the IVF statistics mean, so that you can make the right decisions for your future.

Understanding IVF success and statistics

When considering clinic success rates, it is essential to ensure that comparisons are made between clinics offering similar services. It is also important to consider your personal circumstances and medical history when estimating your chance of having a baby with IVF.

So, how do we measure success?

It should be noted that, in certain cases, the success rates of in vitro fertilization (IVF) are calculated based on the entire treatment and collection cycle. The cycle may involve multiple transfers of embryos derived from the same egg collection. This results in higher success rates than those measured per embryo transfer.

We usually measure IVF success rates as clinical pregnancies per embryo transfer (a pregnancy confirmed by ultrasound scan, usually at around 6-8 weeks). Unfortunately, not every pregnancy will result in a live birth, so we also quote live births per embryo transfer as well as clinical pregnancies per transfer. We report our success rates per embryo transfer because we want to give you the most realistic understanding of your chance of success following each individual embryo transfer.

It's important to remember that not every treatment cycle will result in an embryo transfer. Some women may not have any eggs collected at all, and sometimes no embryo develops after collection, so transfer cannot be performed.

Things to know

It is therefore important to understand what stage of the IVF cycle the statistic refers to. Even after checking this, there are other factors that need to be understood before trying to compare IVF success rates. For example,

⦁   A woman's age is the most crucial factor in determining IVF success rates. When looking at IVF success rates, it's important to make sure you're comparing women of the same age, as this can affect the results you see. If the clinic is quoting whole-clinic rates, think about whether they might have more or fewer clients than the average age. It might also be worth asking if they send more challenging cases elsewhere.

⦁    Ask how often a clinic transfers more than one embryo. More embryos per transfer can make success rates appear higher (this is an important reason why some other clinics' rates appear higher than ours). However, we rarely perform multiple embryo transfers as this can also increase the risk of multiple births, low birth weight and premature births.

⦁    Ask whether the data includes procedures such as ICSI or includes frozen embryo transfers or only 'fresh' embryos.

It can be tricky to understand IVF success rates. we'll always explain how data is calculated as clearly as we can. Individual factors also affect every patient's chance of success. 

The best way to understand your and your partner's likelihood of success is 

to arrange a consultation with us.

Our job is to give you a clear picture of your own personal situation and work with you to create the best possible treatment plan to give you the best chance of having a baby.