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A fertility treatment promoted as a more natural form of IVF is successful in just one in ten cases, leading some experts to question its growing popularity.
Hundreds of British couples every year pay up to £3,000 a time for natural-cycle IVF. It has been growing in popularity – up 30 per cent between 2012 and 2013 – because it does not use drugs and hormones to stimulate the ovaries and is said to be kinder to a woman’s body. For many women it offers their only hope for a baby.
Conventional IVF success rates have more than doubled over 40 years. A quarter of the 60,000 cycles carried out annually in the UK result in a live birth, or one in three for women under 35.
But there are risks involved, including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can cause kidney failure and, in rare cases, death.
Many clinics now offer natural IVF and around two per cent of all cycles are performed this way. It involves tracking a woman’s cycle and harvesting the single egg.
But new data uncovered by...
