A breast cancer drug called Tamoxifen is used to increase success rates in IVF treatments for older women.
Tamoxifen is generally given to patients who have undergone breast cancer surgery to prevent tumors from re-growing, but now a British clinic is pioneering fertility treatment to help women who have crossed 40 and Have a limited chance of getting pregnant due to low egg count
Older women usually have to use donor eggs from another person, which means that at the end of the day they are not biologically related to the baby.
However, early trials with Tamoxifen have shown that about one in five women were able to have a baby using their own eggs.
The pioneering technique used by Professor Geeta Nargund, medical director of Create Fertility has found favorable results.
Professor Nargund conducted a study at a London clinic earlier this year in women with low ovarian reserve whose average age was 40.
The women were given daily doses of tamoxifen for 10 days and then underwent 54 cycles of IVF using fresh and frozen eggs.
The results presented at the British Fertility Conference in Edinburgh in January – showed that six of these 31 women had babies, an average rate of one in five.
Tamoxifen works to treat fertility by reducing estrogen levels and triggers the ovaries to produce higher quality eggs that are more likely to be fertilized in a healthy embryo.
