Answer from: Patricio Calamera, MD, MSc, ObGyn
Well, the chances are pretty good because while studying the patients, we sort of know that lots of things that can go wrong, they are actually not wrong, they are right so, we recommend this patient to go through IVF directly because IVF is not only a way to get them pregnant, it’s also a way to study in a deeper way what’s going on with this couple. While doing IVF, we add to all of the tests and all of the studies that we did to our couple, we add the laboratory part which is how they ovary respond to a protocol, how many eggs do we have, how many of those eggs are mature and how many are not mature or if some of those eggs are pathological while retrieving them. Then, we see the fertilization rate which speak about the quality of those eggs and how they develop the embryo and all that information it’s extremely important because we can see what actually happens inside of the woman uterus, we can see it in the laboratory and of course, it’s a chance to to get them pregnant if you get good quality embryos but in the whole process we see a lot of things that we cannot see in if we don’t go through an IVF protocol.
Answer from: Jane Stewart, MD
Unexplained infertility is not really a diagnosis. It’s more a description of risks and chances, a label we give people who haven’t conceived within a reasonable timeframe. So rather than saying what are the chances of conceiving with unexplained infertility is how you get that label. For young women, young couples, 95% of them, without a problem would conceive within a couple of years of trying. If you haven’t then we consider you statistically to be an outlier. It does not necessarily mean that there is a problem, there might be a number of things that have contrived to make that happen, but at that point we would give a label of so-called unexplained subfertility. It is not absolute but it does recognise at least there might be another problem there that we can’t explain.
