At what age should you worry about your fertility?
As many women enter the workforce and choose to delay starting a family until “the time is right”, women in their 30s and beyond are unaware that they are born with only a certain number of eggs. The number of eggs gradually decreases in number and quality as they grow older, and as a result, so are their chances of getting pregnant.
Women at birth have between 1-2 million eggs, but by puberty, this number decreases to 300-400 thousand. By age 37, most women only have 35,000 eggs left. Not only do they lose eggs, but the eggs also age and diminish in quality. These therefore function less well and result in subfertility and increases one’s chances of miscarriages and chromosomal
abnormalities like Down’s syndrome.
This is unfortunately a natural process of aging but in a society where career and financial stability is highly valued, finding the right partner often happens later in life.
So what can we do for women hoping to start a family after their window of optimal fertility has passed? When is this window and can we find this out? If this has passed, what can we do?
Evaluation is the first step and here at Shanghai United Family Hospital and Clinics. Our fertility specialist can evaluate your potential to conceive and help treat any reversible causes like low thyroid or subfertile sperm.
If the plan is to delay pregnancy, egg freezing has become a real possibility for many women.
Egg freezing has now revolutionized female fertility preservation and has given women more options. While it is not a 100% guarantee, many factors affect the overall outcome, including the age of the eggs, which in turn influences the quality. Many women who come hoping to freeze their eggs are not even aware if there may be other preexisting problems that can make conception difficult.
When you are ready to proceed, a preconception evaluation is crucial in ruling out any underlying diseases that may impact on your ability to conceive. Treatment of such conditions will certainly improve your overall chances.
The technique of egg freezing is more difficult than other assisted reproductive techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intracytoplasmc sperm injection (ICSI) because the process of freezing and thawing often damages the egg.
Without a definite plan to conceive, egg freezing is a good option to preserve female fertility and research has made this possible now.
If egg freezing is not an option, using frozen donor eggs is another approach with high success rates. Although the technology is there, one must be aware that success is not guaranteed. The younger you are when you start, the more options we can offer you in managing your infertility.
So the message is to start early, get a proper evaluation and make a plan to preserve and maintain your potential to conceive for the future.
I HATE Shanghai United Family Hospital, they are arrogant and very unprofessional, had really bad experiences there from refusing to admit my 1 year old daughter (in serious condition) because i had not brought a credit card — in spite of the insurance company confirming on the phone they were ok with it and promising they will issue the confirmation letter in a couple of hours, to a doctor telling me that i had a psychological problem that was making me think i had a cold, when i was perfectly fine (WTF — could a doctor be more rude than that?), to friends being told “What, do you want me to wave my magic wand and make you better?” to admin people coming into friend’s room a few hours after she had a baby to “settle the accounts” and so many more. Also, I find many of their doctors rude too, not only the admin staff.
Parkway has always been nice, even when there were problems, they were settled in favor of the patient (once there was a misunderstanding and the insurance company refused a claim and the way they handled it was really nice, they allowed me to go and do my follow up appointment and only asked me to verbally agree that if this is not taken care of, i will pay myself). Their admin people are always nice and smiling and their nurses are real sweethearts.
I only go to United if it is a middle of the night emergency or if one of the kids needed inpatient treatment.
Let’s be fair about United Family. It’s their admin people that are not very good at service. And maybe a couple of the local specialists don’t have the best bedside manner.
However, my paediatrician and midwife and our family doctor there are all really great.
Dr. Huang, MK, and Dr. Wang. Also, the opthamalogist I had at United Family was excellent in comparison with the one I had at Parkway. Her treatment was spot on. Dr. Shu
I had my eyes checked at SHU too and it was great. Does not justify them letting my daughter possibly die because i had not brought a credit card. And actually they have a couple of good doctors, the rest are awful.
During the week we spent in the hospital with our daughter we saw 4 or 5 different pediatricians and NONE was even close to being a good doctor (we did not see Dr. Huang, whom everyone raves about).
The emergency room doctors are awful too, the 3 times we needed to use the ER were all horrible experiences. Condescending and absolutely cold and indifferent.
I stick with what i said.
I second about Shanghai United Family. It seems like their poor performance extends across the United group. I gave birth to my son at Beijing United last year, and we had a long, traumatic and heartbreaking experience with their staff – everyone from the doctors, finance staff to the President of their parent company.
United are great and all smiles when everything is perfect, but when there’s a problem they have no clue how to handle it. We will never go to any of the United group hospitals ever again even though we have a life membership and discount there because my son was born there.