Question: I have recently failed my IVF, when can I try IVF again?

Dr Helena’s Answer:

The world of IVF is a roller coaster for many patients. As much as IVF brings loads of joy with the success of pregnancies, at the flip side of the coin, IVF can also potentially fail, and left one wonders why it didn’t work.

There are many reasons why an IVF didn’t work out. It is sometimes impossible to find out the exact cause because most of the time, the existing science or technology may not be able to fully pin point the cause, for example, the endometrial receptivity. Science told us that almost 60-70% of the failure rates was caused by chromosomal abnormality of the embryos. This had been one of the reason why the uptake of Pre-implantation genetic screening tests had been rapidly increasing for the last couple of years. However, even in the presence of chromosomally normal embryos, the implantation rate is still ranging between 60-70%, leaving 30-40% of failure rate unanswered.

When your first IVF didn’t work out, one may need to ask what was the cause, find out the solution and then decide on the timing of your next IVF journey. Remember IVF failure sometimes gives the doctors valuable information and insight into your fertility problems. Rushing into another IVF immediately without realigning your strategies may not be the best solution for your problem.

If you have some embryos frozen during your first IVF cycle, you would not need to repeat another IVF cycle. All you need to do is to have the frozen embryos thawed and transfer during the next cycle. This can be done either with medicated cycle or under natural menstrual cycle. This can be done the following cycle after taking a break of a month.

However, if you have no embryos frozen and needed to start another IVF all over again, the earliest one could start the injections would be after a month of break. This is to let our body recover after the previous rounds of hormonal injections. This period of break also gives us plenty of opportunities to look back at the previous failed IVF, identify what are the possible causes and take measures to improve our body condition before the next IVF.