How many eggs are needed?

This is a great question, and this is where the "art" of medicine comes to play. We definately want as many eggs as we can get, but there's a fine line...

If you stimulate a young patient too aggressively, then she can wind up with Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS) which can make you very sick, uncomfortable, and in some cases, create dangerous blood clots. Not only that, there's soo much estrogen usually running around in your body that the egg quality for some reason in some patients diminishes...we say we start "cooking" the eggs. We start seeing this we get over 20 something eggs.

If you give too little medication, well then, you may wind up with too few eggs, not a good thing either...a fine line all REs have to strattle.

This is usually not a problem in patients who are poor responders or those who are over 38 years old. In these cases, they usually get a high doses of gonadotropins (FSH) to stimulate all their eggs since the risk of OHSS is minimal and/or "cooking" the eggs in an attempt to try and get all of her available eggs to fertilize and hopefully create a pregnancy.