What treatments are available for female infertility?

What treatments are available for female infertility?

Richard Paulson (Chief, Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, USC) gives expert video advice on: What treatments are available for male infertility?; What treatments are available for female infertility?; Are there specific fertility treatments for women over the age of 35? and more...

As in any other branch of medicine, treatment, of course, has to be focused on whatever the particular problem is. So for example, if a woman has blocked fallopian tubes, then it would be logical that we would try to unblock those, and that kind of repair is of course surgical. If a woman is not ovulating, then a common way to help her is to give her fertility medications, which will help her ovulate. In couples who have unexplained infertility, or in whom there is not a problem with ovulation or with any other obvious kind of issue, we use a treatment called "super ovulation and intrauterine insemination." In this treatment the woman is given fertility medications to help her ovaries release the eggs that are being produced there. And then at the time of ovulation, we take the sperm, concentrated, and put it into the uterus, thereby bypassing the cervix and bypassing a natural barrier to the sperm that sometimes can prevent them from getting up to the site of ovulation and to the site of fertilization. And of course if all else fails, we now have high-tech fertility, and that includes all the different kinds of acronyms: IVF for "in vitro fertilization", or GIFT for "gamete intrafallopian transfer", or ZIFT for "zygote intrafallopian transfer." We have a bunch of these kinds of "alphabet soups" but the principle is always the same. And that is that we take the eggs directly out of the ovary, combine the eggs and sperm in the laboratory, and then put the embryos, or put the egg and sperm back into the woman's body in some kind of fashion. And the high-tech fertility treatments, of course, are the most complex, but they also have the highest probability of success.