How can London Women’s Clinic help?
We are a team made up of fertility industry leaders offering world-class, tailorable treatments across the UK to aid your IVF journey.
We offer a bespoke IVF programme that combines established techniques to optimise the chances of obtaining good quality embryos and achieving a pregnancy, even when the odds are against it.
We’ve helped thousands of women over 40 achieve their family goals through our excellent IVF programme available across the UK. View our leading success rates.
‘I feel so grateful to my egg donor, London Egg Bank and London Women’s Clinic for making this possible. I hope by sharing my story that it might encourage other women to explore this path to parenthood’
Events
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Either in our clinics or from the comfort of your home, find out more about Fertility for the Over-40s.
FAQs
All women are born with a fixed store of eggs in the ovaries (ovarian reserve) which steadily decline each month through ovulation and natural loss. Eventually, this store of eggs simply runs out, and menopause signals the end of a woman’s fertile life.
Even in the years preceding menopause, menstrual cycles may become irregular and fertility much less predictable. The eggs released from the ovaries might not be as good as they once were, impacting the likelihood of successful and healthy pregnancies.
Not all women over forty are infertile, and the chance of conception for many may still be quite good. Indeed, the number of women over forty having a baby has risen four-fold in the past thirty years – and in Britain births to women over thirty-five now represent one in five of all babies born.
Studies in recent years have shown beyond doubt that the chromosome arrangements of many eggs (and the embryos which they form) are not perfectly correct, and that this problem increases as we get older. Normal embryos should contain 23 pairs of chromosomes - one from each parent - but some studies have shown that as many as 50% of all embryos derived from women of an advanced maternal age are chromosomally abnormal. This is why older women are at greater risk of miscarriage and of giving birth to babies with chromosomal abnormalities, such as Down's Syndrome.
With advancing age, women in their late 30s and early 40s are at a significantly increased risk that their eggs will have more abnormalities. This leads to a correspondingly higher incidence of genetically unbalanced embryos following IVF.
Undergoing Embryo Screening (PGT-A) will help assess embryos pre-embryo transfer to lower chances of chromosomal abnormalities such as those that can cause Down 's Syndrome occurring.
In particular women in their late thirties and early forties can benefit from embryo screening due to their increased chance of having embryos with chromosomal imbalance.
Women and couples who have suffered multiple miscarriages or failed IVF treatments may also find this treatment beneficial, as screening would optimise the chance that only embryos with normal numbers of balanced chromosomes are used for transfer.
Egg donation is also a popular option for women in their 40s, particularly women over 42, as success rates for treatment with their own eggs tends to decline significantly after this age.
Although the baby will not be genetically related to the mother, egg donation can provide a woman with the opportunity to still carry and give birth to her baby, and research has shown that bonding is unaffected.