KEY POINTS:
A new private fertility clinic in Auckland aims to halve treatment times for in-vitro fertilisation.
IVF Auckland, which opens its doors officially today, aims to use a procedure that is still relatively little-used in New Zealand as its default option for couples needing help to conceive.
Its medical director, Dr Guy Gudex, said overseas studies had shown that the shorter cycle IVF treatment the clinic was championing was just as effective as the standard month-long cycle used to stimulate a woman's egg production.
The current standard treatment used in New Zealand, known as down regulation, requires two to three weeks of daily injections of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist to hold off ovulation. This effectively allows the doctor to control the timing of the woman's cycle.
After two weeks, a second daily injection of egg follicle-stimulating hormone is introduced to promote multiple egg development. The patient self-administers the two injections for a further 10 to 12 days before a final hormonal "trigger" injection is given to allow for the eggs to be harvested.
The shorter treatment skips out the first two to three weeks of the standard drug treatment, so ovulation is not suppressed.
Instead, just the follicle-stimulating hormone is administered daily for 10 days. After five to seven days, the "antagonist" drug is introduced as a second injection and kept up for four or five days before egg harvest.
Dr Gudex said fertility clinics here had done a number of the shorter cycle treatments over the past few years.
"The difference really is that we're going to be having it as our default option. We're doing it because they're much more acceptable to patients."
A Dutch study published in the Lancet found similar pregnancy rates for both types of treatment, but patients were more in favour of the shorter treatment.
* IVF Auckland (09) 524-1232
