Tag: conceive

Have you and your partner decided you’re ready to be parents—or have another baby?

According to Baby Center, 85 percent of couples who actively try to get pregnant will conceive within about one year, or 12 menstrual cycles. If they are not able to conceive after one year, it is recommended at that time that they may want to consult a fertility expert. (This time period is reduced to six months before seeing an expert if the woman is over 35 years old.)

Regardless of whether you’re in the early stages of trying to conceive or have been trying for a while, here are a few science-backed tips that may help get your body primed for fertility success.

It’s amazing isn’t it? You turn on the television these days and all you see on every channel is some teenager getting knocked up by super sperm. It's depressing because for many of us, getting pregnant is not so easy. We’ve heard from literally hundreds of couples who are stressed out because the quality of their sex lives has suffered due to the pressure to conceive. We thought a few out-of-the-box suggestions might ease your tension and hopefully help make conception a little bit easier and more fun.

Couples who are obese may take longer to achieve pregnancy than partners who aren't as overweight, a recent U.S. study suggests.

Previous studies in women have linked obesity to difficulties getting pregnant. In the current study, neither male nor female obesity alone was linked to taking a longer time to conceive, but when both partners were obese, the couple took up to 59 percent longer to conceive than non-obese counterparts.

"If our results are confirmed, fertility specialists may want to take couples' weight status into account when counseling them about achieving pregnancy," said lead study author Rajeshwari Sundaram of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.

If only I was Tyrian Lannister of Game of Thrones—knowing things about who was going to win the war for the iron throne instead of this taboo topic of infertility. If someone five years ago would have told me, a marine and total man-child, everything I know now about infertility, I would’ve laughed in their face.

When you think about infertility you usually think about the perspective of the woman. There is a lot more going on in the uterus than there is in the testicles. The human woman's reproductive organ is a mystery even today.

A new calculator can help couples see their odds of success with in vitro fertilization (IVF) before they start treatment, a recent study suggests.

Doctors have traditionally been reluctant to estimate couples’ chances of having a baby before they complete at least one cycle of IVF, allowing clinicians to assess the quality of the eggs, sperm and embryos in addition to individual characteristics such as age, weight and medical conditions.

With the new pre-treatment calculator, however, women can get an estimate of their chances before that first cycle of IVF and it can be adjusted based on what doctors discover after that cycle is completed, said lead study author Dr. David McLernon of the University of Aberdeen in the U.K.

Boys conceived through a common type of fertilization procedure may produce less sperm and experience more struggles with fertility than peers born the old fashioned way, a recent study suggests.

Researchers focused on 54 men conceived by what’s known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a technique developed in the 1990s to treat cases when infertility is tied to problems with a man’s sperm.

Compared to a control group of similar men conceived naturally, the ICSI group had much lower average sperm concentration, total sperm count and total motile or active sperm count.