Insem or ICSI?

Question

I just had my IVF consult with my RE. We talked about the “normal” insemination in IVF or ICSI and he said he doesn’t really recommend ICSI for us because we have no male factor. But I’ve known a few girls who did the normal way and ended up with only 1 embryo which makes me nervous. Thoughts on which to do? My RE says ICSI doesn’t increase chances of fertilization really.

Answer

My hubbys sperm count was low and morphology not great we had icsi done. 12 eggs 7 fertilized. 2 fresh transfer 4 made it to freeze.

Answer

There is certainly no need for ICSI unless there is an issue with the sperm. We did conventional insem and, as predicted by our RE (and as is the scientifically “normal” outcome for fertilization), we ended up with half the number of embryos by Day 5 that initially fertilized on Day 1...in our case, 10 initially fertilized, with 5 making it to Day 5 to be frozen.

Answer

Don’t really need it unless they think it’s a major issue. We have male factor infertility, just did egg retrieval “Conventional” no ISCI & out of 11 eggs, 9 Fertilized.

Answer

i was told by the embryologist at our clinic that if make facor is not an issue then the fertilization rate average is 70%  for both regular ans ICSI. she said some more complicated stuff if i can remember right... the eggs that are retreived have  a laye if small cells around them that nourish them. in regular ivf eggs that are almost mature can be nourished by those cells and finish maturing in the dish. for icsi they have to poke around those cells to look at the egg to see how mature it is. if its not mature they cant use it for ICSI. they then put it back in with the other eggs so hopefull the outer cells in those  will help mature the one they poked around on. we decided to do half ICSI just in case then when we gor 17 eggs we chose to do 7 icsi and 10 IVF.

Answer

My clinic automatically does ICSI for all mature eggs, regardless of the sperm quality. My husband has perfect sperm (296 million and no abnormalities) and they still did ICSI. We had 8 fertilized out of 11 and 6 made it to day 5. I would trust your docs and your intuition. For us, being that this is SUCH an expensive process, we didn’t want to risk it.

Answer

I’m in Southern California and according to 2 REs that I’ve seen, no clinic in SoCal not doing ICSI anymore. I might be wrong. Cost is $1500 per batch; no matter how many embryos you have.

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Our Dr recommended a “just in case option” we told him we want best case scenario options and peace of mind (unexplained infertility). Which means we only paid for 3 eggs to get ICSI (the other 11 were the normal method, this also proved to be diagnostic for us). In our case while this is crazy, crazy expensive (insurance won’t cover 🤬). For us this ended up being $2k. Considering everything else we paid, we were okay with doing this - better 3 embabies than none!!! Good luck to you, there is no wrong answe 💓

Answer

We have male factor, morphology specifically. We STILL only had a 50% fertilization rate with ICSI. I’m 34, and because of the poor fertilization rate, my doctor says we have poor egg quality too.

Answer

My clinic will do it if they believe the embryo will not fertilize on it's own. It's not something that is an option?

Insem or ICSI?

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