Online IVF calculator predicts fertility treatment success rates

Web resource based on five years of medical records aims to tell women their likelihood of giving birth with 99% accuracy
Women hoping to have a baby through fertility treatment can from today use an online calculator to show them how likely they are to succeed.

IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) is expensive, only sometimes available on the NHS and less successful than many people think.

To help couples to decide whether IVF is worth pursuing for them, academics at Glasgow and Bristol have created the calculator, which they say will predict a woman's likelihood of giving birth with up to 99% accuracy.

"In the US and the UK, IVF is successful in about a third of women under 35 years old, but in only 5%-10% of women over the age of 40," said Professor Scott Nelson, Muirhead chair of reproductive and maternal medicine at the University of Glasgow.

"However, there are many other factors in addition to age which can alter your chance of success, and clinics don't usually take these into account when counselling couples or women."

The calculator, available for free at www.ivfpredict.com, is based on data from more than 144,000 IVF cycles held by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) – all the outcomes of treatments undergone between 2003 and 2007.

"Essentially, these findings indicate that treatment-specific factors can be used to provide infertile couples with a very accurate assessment of their chance of a successful outcome following IVF," Nelson said.

"It provides critical information on the likely outcome for couples deciding whether to undergo IVF. Up until now, estimates of success have not been reliable.

"The result of this study is a tool which can be used to make incredibly accurate predictions."

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