How will my doctor test for female infertility?
If we have a couple who comes and they say they've been trying for a year and it's not working, or perhaps we even have a woman come to the office by herself and say, "I'm getting married next month; I really want to make sure my fertility is normal," the kinds of tests we run really pertain to the two main factors that are important in a woman's fertility. One of them is ovulation and the other one is the presence of a normal uterus and normal fallopian tubes. For ovulation, first of all we get a history, because if someone has regular menstrual cycles, the chances are 90 percent that they're ovulating. Another way of thinking of that is that a woman who has regular cycles has a ten percent chance of not ovulating. It's really quite simple to do a blood test for progesterone in what we call the Late Luteal Phase or perhaps even to have the patient do a urinary ovulation kit at home and see that she is ovulating during a particular time of the cycle. For the uterus and the fallopian tubes, there are a number of tests that can be done. The simplest by far is the X-ray, which is called a hysterosalpingogram, or HSG. In other instances we may do a laparoscopy or some other kind of imaging study, for example an ultrasound, to verify that the uterus and the fallopian tubes are normal.
