- I'm Laura Detti.
I'm the Chair of Subspecialty Care
for Women's Health at the Cleveland Clinic,
and I am a Reproductive Endocrinologist
and Infertility Specialist by training.
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So infertility is a disease and it is defined by
the timing that a person has spent trying to conceive.
Depending on the age of the female,
infertility is diagnosed when a couple
has been trying conception for over a year,
if the woman is younger than 35 years of age,
and if the woman instead, is older than 35,
then even just six months attempting
conception with unprotected intercourse
can be defined as infertility.
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Unfortunately, it is fairly common.
Here in the United States, we can gauge
it at approximately one to two of
every 10 couples who experiences infertility.
We can identify four main categories
of infertility which are defined by
different risk factors.
The tubal factor infertility, uterine factor,
ovulatory dysfunction, and male factor.
The tubal factor is the most common,
and that can be caused by Endometriosis,
A very common condition of the female pelvis.
Now, there's many environmental factors also
that are basically acquired and can cause infertility.
To name a few, eating disorders that can cause
ovulatory dysfunction or excessive alcohol use,
radiation therapy or other cancer treatments
with chemotherapy, also treatments
for auto-immune conditions with
chemotherapy, smoking, stress.
All these are environmental risk factors for infertility.
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Contraception does not cause infertility.
Their action, their function actually,
is over as soon as they're removed from the system.
So Plan B does not cause infertility.
Plan B is basically a hormonal contraception,
that is an emergency contraception as far
as abortion as a cause of infertility,
again, the answer would be no,
unless that they are complications such as infections.
There are several treatment options
that we can employ in the treatment of infertility.
The first and simplest, would be
just to induce ovulation with the oral
medications and allow for a timed intercourse,
if the semen analysis is normal.
Our possibly most effective treatment for infertility
and our last resort is performing
in-vitro fertilization or IVF.
In-vitro fertilization entails inducing an ovulation
that will allow for retrieving multiple eggs out of the
female that can be combined with
the partners' sperm in the laboratory, in a Petri dish,
and then it will allow for the creation of embryos that are
typically cultured up to day five of development
and one embryo at a time is then transferred
inside the uterus and the other
embryos are typically frozen to
allow future fertility in that couple.
Because there are many means for us
to understand what is the infertility
that affects a specific couple,
and so there are many treatments that we can implement.
Don't give up, because there's always a lot of hope
in what we do, and the treatments
that we can offer for infertility.