I am always looking for ways to increase the chance for pregnancy in my IVF patients.
Several viewers have asked whether exercising before or during IVF will improve IVF success.
Lets take a look!
Stay tuned.
There is no doubt that exercise is beneficial for your general health for many different
reasons.
Is it beneficial for fertility?
This is a more difficult question to answer than you might think.
These days, many many couples with infertility are overweight or obese.
Being overweight or obese has a negative impact on fertility.
I covered that topic in this video.
Exercise can help with weight loss so it is reasonable to conclude that exercise leading
to weight loss can improve fertility.
What about exercise that doesn’t result in weight loss?
Does that help fertility?
Specifically, does it improve IVF success?
There are several small studies that cover the topic of exercise and IVF.
Some studies showed better IVF outcomes and some did not.
If you are a subscriber to InfertilityTV, you know that when there are multiple small
studies with conflicting results, one way to try to figure out answers to these questions
is to combine the smaller studies into one larger study.
This is called a meta analysis.
In 2018, researchers conducted a meta analysis on studies looking at exercise and IVF success.
There were some limitations to this meta analysis.
First, only 8 studies were identified.
One larger study with about 2000 patients and the rest were smaller studies with 38
to 436 patients.
Second, all of these studies looked at the results of IVF cycles with a fresh embryo
transfer, which is not done very often anymore.
These days, most IVF attempts from top IVF centers use frozen embryos.
This is an important point since we don’t know if the effects of exercise, if any, apply
to frozen embryo transfers.
Third, the studies weren’t very similar.
The types of exercise, the intensity of exercise and the duration of exercise were generally
different.
They didn’t all have the same endpoints.
Some looked at whether a pregnancy was found on ultrasound, called a clinical pregnancy,
and some looked at actual live birth rates.
These differences make it harder to rely on the results of a meta analysis.
What were the results?
In these studies combined, there did seem to be a small benefit to exercise.
The clinical pregnancy rate was slightly higher and the live birth rate was slightly higher.
There did not seem to be a higher risk for miscarriage.
However, these studies had women that were of different ages and different weights.
When they controlled for those differences, there was no longer any improvement in the
live birth rate.
When they look at women who had more intensive exercise, more than 2 and a half hours per
week, they also found no difference in the live birth rate.
Our InfertilityTV Bottom Line is this.
There is no clear evidence that exercise will increase your chances of having a baby with
IVF.
However, exercise before and during IVF cycles did not seem to cause any worsening of the
pregnancy rate either.
So should you exercise before your IVF cycle?
As I said before, there are lots of other health benefits from exercise and it doesn’t
seem to hurt anything so sure go ahead and exercise.
At the same time, you shouldnt worry that not exercising will put you
at a disadvantage.