Tag Archives: AMH

Anti Mullerian Hormone (AMH)- The Ultimate Ovarian Reserve Test?

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What you should know about AMH

 

When you seek medical advice for infertility issues, one of the hormone tests that you be advice to take is the Anti-Mullerian Hormone or AMH test. This test measures the AMH levels in your blood, which helps doctors determine your ovarian or egg reserve.

 

In this post, I’ll explain what egg reserves and AMH tests are, as well as what you can do if your AMH levels are low:

 

About egg reserves

Humans are born with a limited amount of eggs. To be precise, a girl is born with between one to two million immature eggs or follicles in her ovaries. But not all these follicles will survive into adulthood. In fact, throughout a woman’s life, the majority of her immature eggs will die in a natural process called atresia.

 

Did you know that by the time a girl has her first period, only about 400,000 follicles are left? And with each subsequent period, she loses about a thousand follicles, while just one matures into an ovum or egg. This means, throughout her reproductive life, a woman will develop only about 400 ovum. The number of developing follicles a woman has left, is called her “ovarian or egg reserve.”

 

Egg reserves and the quality of those eggs vary from one woman to another, due to factors such as age and infertility. Over time, both the quantity and quality of a woman’s eggs gradually decreases. Therefore, when seeking treatment for infertility, it is important for a woman to gain insight into the remaining quantity of her egg reserve and fertile years.

What is AMH?

When follicles develop in a woman’s egg reserve, her body release the Anti-Müllerian Hormone (AMH). AMH levels, therefore, can give us a good idea of the state of a woman’s ovarian reserve. Since AMH levels are determined by the number of developing follicles in a woman’s ovaries, low AMH levels are an indication that the ovarian reserve is depleted.

 

Fewer developing follicles mean slimmer chances for a mature and healthy egg to be released and fertilised. As such, when a woman knows the state of her egg reserve, she can determine how urgently she requires treatment.

 

AMH testing
While egg reserves generally decline in the mid to late 30s, leading to low AMH, age is not the only factor. Environmental factors can also cause low AMH, such as cancer treatment and inherited genetic causes. AMH levels can be easily assessed with a blood test, but like most diagnostic tests, it has its limitations. For example, it cannot indicate the quality of the eggs that are left, which requires a separate test. However, as AMH levels remain fairly constant in a woman’s cycle, she can have the test at any time.

 

What Can’t AMH tells you

 

As much as we would like to believe that AMH is ‘the ultimate test’ for ovarian reserves, however, it only tells us some aspect of your fertility performances but not all. AMH does not tell you the quality of your eggs. Therefore, some women who have plenty of eggs and high AMH level may not perform well in an IVF treatment cycle because of poor egg quality.

 

For women who take oral contraceptive pills, AMH level may not be a true reflection of their ovarian reserves. Those who were taking the pill had 19 percent lower levels of AMH and 16 percent fewer early-stage follicles.

 

Recently, there has been clinical studies which reported that there is a significant variation in serum AMH levels across the menstrual cycle regardless of ovulatory status. This variability, although statistically significant, is not large enough to warrant a change in current clinical practice to time AMH measurements to cycle day/phase.

What you can do

If you should take an AMH test and find that your level is low, do not lose heart! Your AMH level is just one piece in a complex jigsaw puzzle. Your best course of action is to discuss matters with your infertility specialist. Ask your doctor how you can protect your egg count and health, as well as discuss the best possible solution to your problem. For example, DHEA supplementation and well-managed IVF protocols have been shown to be effective in improving IVF pregnancy rates in women with low AMH. Maintain a positive outlook and don’t give up on your dreams of having a baby!

 

Can IVF bring on early menopause?

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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.