Can IVF bring on early menopause?

One of the most common question patients like to ask about IVF is that whether the treatment itself will bring on Menopause earlier. This is probably by far one of the greatest myths about IVF which we would like to clarify.

A woman’s ovaries contain immature eggs sacs known as follicles, which have the potential of developing into mature eggs. However, most of these follicles will be lost without having fulfilled their purpose.

Women are born with millions of eggs in their ovaries. These eggs are quiescent in the ovaries until the women reach the age of menarche (when they get their first menses). At that time, the eggs in the ovaries started to come up after hibernating for 10-16 years. This is due to a pulsatile release of hormones from the organs below our brain called hypothalamus and pituitary. So, at the start of our menses, our ovaries will recruit around 10-20 eggs at one go. However, after the menses, our body will only choose one egg to grow. The rest of the eggs will regress and die off. With the help of our hormones, the particular ‘chosen’ egg with grow to a certain size and maturity, and then ovulation will occur. Hence, we only release one mature egg every menstrual cycle.

But of these many follicles, only one of them will become dominant and mature. The others that do not get a chance to mature and release an egg, will simply disintegrate and be lost in a natural process called atresia. The loss of these follicles during each menstrual cycle means that several undeveloped eggs are also lost.

Therefore, throughout a woman’s reproductive life, her ovaries will release only around 400 eggs, despite being born with millions of eggs. So basically, we ‘wasted’ around 12-20 each menstrual cycle, until the day when we reach menopause, whereby there is NO eggs in our ovaries

So if a woman can naturally produce only one egg per menstrual cycle? How do IVF specialists harvest several eggs at once?

For a woman who is undergoing an IVF treatment, the use of injectable fertility drugs (hormonal drugs) will stimulate her ovaries to overcome the natural tendency of choosing one dominant egg and ‘wasting’ other eggs produced during this particular cycle. In this scenario, the hormonal injections will stimulate all the eggs recruited during this particular cycle to grow simultaneously. Once these eggs reached a certain size and maturity, they are being harvested during an egg retrieval procedure

When a woman undergoes IVF, she will be prescribed with injections containing FSH. The amount given will be several times higher than what her body would naturally produce. This high amount of FSH will stimulate a lot more follicles than usual and help more of them to mature into eggs. An important thing to understand is that FSH will only act on the follicles that a woman’s body will naturally produce each month. Therefore, there is no depletion of the overall egg supply. And when those eggs are harvested during an IVF treatment, they have actually been spared from atresia that would have occurred during that menstrual cycle.

It is also important to note, that whether or not they undergo IVF, women who struggle with infertility are usually already at risk of having poor ovarian reserve and reaching early menopause. One of the tests that can be used to detect low ovarian reserve is the Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) blood test. Egg reserves and AMH levels usually decline with age and can be affected by environmental factors such as cancer treatment or ovarian surgery, as well as inherited genetic causes, endometriosis, tumors, immunological conditions and high body mass index.

With that in mind, studies conducted by research teams around the world, including the British Fertility Society, Queensland University, Australia, and Cornell University, US have confirmed that IVF, even with multiple cycles, does not lead to egg depletion nor early menopause.

Having studied hundreds of IVF patients through the years, these researchers have concluded that IVF does not affect the timing or severity of menopause symptoms. In fact, many IVF patients reach menopause at the average age of just over 50, which is comparable to most national averages and closely resemble that of their own mothers’. The studies also found that most respondents had given birth to at least one child as a result of IVF.