Immune Treatment - How Long Before You Were Given the Green Light to Begin Cycling?

[Anonymous]

Hi. I have a question for those who have done immune testing and treatments. I've finished all of my blood work (working w/ the Beer Center in CA), but have yet to get the results back. Understanding that the answer to this question may change based upon the issues identified/treatments prescribed, how long did you have to undergo a particular treatment before you were given the green light to begin cycling? (I'm doing DE.) I'm just trying to get a ball park idea. Thank you.

[Anonymous]

It does largely depend on your treatment. Initially I did one month of Humira (2 shots 2 weeks apart), retest, first IVIG, retest, second IVIG, retest, green light. After doing all that my numbers were good during subsequent cycles. Keep in mind it takes a week or so to get monitoring panels back because generally they are less time consuming then the initial panel. That was with AEB and Dr. Abbasi. I started Humira in May and got the green light in July.

With Dr. Braverman it was a quicker process because we already had good numbers and he was only prescribing one med, Neupogen. That was with my first baby. With my second baby we did the initial panel and he prescribed prednisone in addition to the Neupogen so we started trying as soon as he made his recommendations and I filled my prescriptions.

If you are doing DE I think you will want to get everything ready to go before ER, and certainly before transfer. It might be kind of hard to plan, but also your RI/RE should have an idea of what kind of timeline you are looking at.

[Anonymous]

It depends somewhat on the severity of the issue. I had extremely elevated NK cell cytotoxicity and ended up needing a few months of steroids and IVIG (plus re-testing) to ensure that my numbers were down to manageable levels. If your initial numbers are lower, they might just recommend proceeding to transfer with steroids and IVIG or intralipids (assuming the Beer Center allows intralipids now--I'm not sure they do) as a part of your transfer protocol.