blastocyst or day 3 transfer?

[Anonymous]

please advise. RE is advising blast. any experience/knowledge? i had blast transfer last time and it was unsuccessful. how many embryos should i consider transferring? RE is recommending one. i know there is no right or wrong answer to this but I do want to make intelligent decision about this. are there any embryos left to freeze if I did day 5 transfer? my guess is many would not make it to day 5 and I will not have any left?

[Anonymous]

How many embryos do you have now? I think that if you have a lot of high-quality embryos on day 3, a day 5 transfer can make sense (obviously, your RE can explain this better than I can). Last time I did a day 3 tranfer b/c I only had 3 embryos on day 3 and one of them was clearly better than the others, so the REs thought there was nothing to be gained by waiting 2 more days. Also, the stats my RE showed me (I am at SG) showed that pregnancy rates for day 5 transfers were virtually the same whether you transfer 1 or 2 blasts. So by transfering 1, you are decreasing your risk of having twins and thereby decreasing your chances of the health risks that are associated with twins. Hope that helps!!!! Good luck with whatever you decide!!!

[Anonymous]

If you have several embryos on day 3 it makes sense to wait until day 5 to see which ones become the "strongest" and best quality.

I had 6 embryos on day 3... none were good quality. So we waited until day 5 to see which ones made it to blast and which ones didn't. By day 5 they were able to select the "best" ones to transfer.

However, like the PP said, if you only have 2-3 on day 3 and can identify the strongest, why wait?

[Anonymous]

I'm pretty sure that per embryo, blast transfer has a better success rate. That's why most REs recommend transferring 2 3-day embryos, but in cases where the woman is under 35 and it is her first or second IVF, they often recommend transferring only one blastocyst.

With my first IVF, we did an elective single blastocyst transfer. We had 8 good looking embryos on day 3, so the RE wanted to push to blastocyst (on day 3, they could not tell which of the 8 was better to transfer). That cycle was negative, but we had 2 blasts left to freeze.

I just did a second cycle and on day 3, we had 6 embryos still growing, but only 2 were of good quality - the RE said that since those 2 were clearly showing themselves to be of better quality than the others, we should do a day 3 transfer. We did and I just had a first positive beta yesterday. None of the remaining embryos made it to freeze (I am at Shady Grove and they only freeze high-quality blastocysts).