Efficacy and Safety of Medication Used to Stimulate Ovulation

Plain-language summary

Individuals undergoing In Vitro Fertilization must undergo controlled ovarian hyperstimulation (COH) to produce enough quality eggs for fertility treatment. Ovarian follicular responsiveness to COH with gonadotropins is extremely variable between patients and even from cycle to cycle for the same patient. Achieving an ideal follicular response is critical to the success of assisted reproduction treatment (ART). Patients have been classified as 'poor', 'normal' or 'high' responders, which dictate the amount of gonadotropins that they receive. It is still important to develop treatments with high efficacy, lower multiple birth rates, and a lower complication rate for each of these groups. In an era of evidence-based medicine and with special emphasis on reducing IVF risks (mainly OHSS and pregnancies with multiples), it is very important to find optimal and safe ovulation induction and triggering regimens for each patient population. The use of GnRH agonist (GnRHa) triggering among high responders in order to reduce or eliminate OHSS is an example of an important breakthrough in the clinical management of IVF patients. Although GnRHa triggering was shown to be as effective as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) at inducing oocyte maturation more than 20 years ago, its use to trigger ovulation was not possible until the introduction of GnRH antagonists for pituitary suppression. Another prominent trend in ART in recent years has been the introduction of dual triggering, which involves a combination of GnRHa plus hCG for triggering. This regimen creates simultaneous lutenizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) surges by the GnRHa, which resembles physiologic ovulation triggering, together with sustained LH-like activity from the hCG, which stimulates the corpus luteum to excrete sufficient hormonal endometrial support. Since its introduction, dual triggering has been gaining popularity due to outstanding results in retrospective studies among both normal and high responders. Moreover, in spite of the encouraging retrospective reports, prospective randomized controlled trials (RCT) on dual triggering have not been reported to date. The aim of the current proposed study is to compare the efficacy of dual triggering and conventional triggering among the three IVF populations (high, normal and poor responders).

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