Biological clock professional#

The issue is not only related to conception, but also carrying the pregnancy to term. On the other hand, for women above 40 year-old, the evaluation and treatment should start immediately. As a result of all of these, while infertility is defined as inability to conceive after 1 year of regular unprotected intercourse, both American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommend to start evaluation and treatment (as needed) after 6 months of trying to conceive for women above 35 year-old. For example, if a woman starts family building at age 40 and gets pregnant and has a baby at age 41, then the next time she will attempt pregnancy again will be 2-3 years later, at which time conception will be much less likely to happen than the first time around. The end result is that it becomes more and more difficult to build a family this difficulty is multiplied especially when one desires more than one child to complete their family. We can see the effect of this from statistics published by CDC: The percentage of women with diminished ovarian reserve who underwent an assisted reproductive technology to conceive increased from 14% in 2005 to 31% in 2016.

Biological clock professional#

This is of utmost importance for women because, during the last couple of decades, women are delaying their childbearing for many reasons, be it due to professional goals, financial barriers or other social reasons. Moreover, we all know that the risk of Down syndrome increases with increasing age of the mother, due to exactly the mechanism that we just explained.Īs a result, aging is associated with both decreasing quantity and quality of the eggs. Persons with this syndrome have an extra chromosome 21, which is due to the egg having two chromosome 21 instead of just one when this egg fertilizes with a normal sperm, the embryo ends up with three chromosome 21.

A good example for this is Down syndrome. Some are missing chromosome(s) while others have extra chromosome(s). However, with aging, most likely due to abnormal division processes, not each egg ends up with the expected 23 chromosomes. Normally, each human egg has to have 23 chromosomes when it is fertilized by the sperm, that is also supposed to have 23 chromosomes, the ensuing embryo ends up with 46 chromosomes, with 2 copies of each chromosome, and which is the normal chromosome (DNA) complement for a human being. What do we mean by quality? When it comes to the eggs, the quality refers mostly to the number of chromosomes (our DNA) that each egg has. And it is not just the number of the eggs, but their quality also diminishes. Some studies show that the attrition of the eggs may not be at a steady pace throughout reproductive life, and that the rate of loss may be increasing around 35-37 years of age.

Please remember, this is part of the normal physiology of female reproduction. So, if we do the math with average age at the time of first period being 12 and at the time of menopause being 51, we see that women lose an average of 800-900 eggs per month, while ovulating 1 egg. This number decreases to 300,000-400,000 the first time a woman has her period, and at the time of the last menstrual period, which is the start of the menopause, roughly 1,000 eggs are left in the ovaries. Once the eggs reach this peak, they stop dividing and start dying off, so much so that at the time of birth, only 1-2 million eggs are left in the ovaries. At this stage of life, a woman had approximately 6-7 million eggs. The highest number of eggs that a woman ever had was actually before birth, when her mother was 5 months pregnant with her. Women are born with all the eggs that they will ever have for their lifetime.