Science Letters

Different concepts of controlled ovarian stimulation for management of poor responders during IVF treatment

Humphrey Ochin, Xiang Ma, Yan Meng, Jie Huang, Wei Wang, Wei Ding, Yundong Mao, Yu-Gui Cui, Jiayin Liu*

Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine, Centre for Clinical Reproductive Medicine, First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University Nanjing, 210029, P. R China

Abstract

Management of poor responders in assisted reproduction still remained a big challenge for fertility specialists, despite of the high number of published papers on poor ovarian response in literature for the past two decades. Until now definition for poor responder patients is still not universally accepted in the field of the scientific community. However, these groups of patients usually have a lower controlled ovarian stimulation or IVF treatment outcomes when compared with normal responders. The limitation in identifying and solving the challenges of poor ovarian response in IVF treatment is due to the difficulty of no universally accepted definition in most of the literature. Poor responders are patients unable to develop sufficient number of mature oocytes for collection or the production of ≤3 follicles after a standard stimulation protocol. The number of developed follicles and number of eggs retrieved after a standard stimulation of ovary are the two major criteria used in predicting poor ovarian response. In this review, we have discussed the different concepts of controlling ovarian stimulation for the management of poor responders during in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.

Keywords: Follicle, IVF treatment, ovarian stimulation, poor responders.

Received April 10, 2015 Revised June 17, 2015 Published online first June 29, 2015

*Corresponding author: Jiayin Liu Email: jyliu_nj@126.com