Fertility treatment and IVF success rates

When comparing different fertility clinics, it’s important to remember that success rates are one part of the picture. Other factors such as support and clinical care are huge factors in how patients feel about their fertility journeys, and can impact the outcome.

There are key factors that can affect the success of IVF, such as the cause of infertility, and the individual patients themselves. Patient's BMI, age, and underlying health conditions, or infertility can all impact on their success rate.

Some of the key things to look for when comparing are age and egg source, and whether the data presents births per embryos transferred or per embryo transfer events, and any other variables that could be behind differing statistics. Certain clinics may specialise in treating particular kinds of infertility that can impact on their success rates.

The national average is taken from the HFEA, the UK's fertility sector regulatory body. The HFEA collects and publishes data from different clinics in the UK. According to the HFEA, the most important thing to focus on when looking at success rates is whether a clinic’s results are consistent with the national average. They recommend avoiding reading into differences within a few percentage points, as they can be down to chance rather than a clinic’s abilities. For each of our IVF success rate measures, we also show the national average, so that you can compare.

Apricity operates a satellite treatment model, where assessment, drug therapy and monitoring are managed by Apricity, and egg collection, embryology and embryo transfer take place within our network of

A clinic’s IVF success rate is the percentage of treatments that result in a clinical pregnancy, birth, or live birth. Understanding how each is measured is important for ensuring that you are fully informed on the average chances of success.

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Particularly, and most significantly, for women over 40 years old, the chances of a live birth more than doubles when using an egg donor. And when the woman is 43 and upwards, chances of IVF success are over 7 times higher when using an egg donor over own eggs. We have illustrated key findings from the data in the graph below:

Quite simply, when it comes to having a baby, egg donation considerably overtakes IVF with own eggs. Yet the research showed that egg donation was not ‘widely used’. It is understandable on an emotional level why not, but these statistics seem to be too important to miss when considering options.

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This study looked at the number of eggs collected from cycles of treatment to the outcome of live births and found that the ideal number of eggs to collect is between 10- 15. This gives the recipient couple the greatest chance of a live birth and a family.

All the Altrui egg donors who have undergone IVF cycles to date have produced the ideal number of eggs and the donors have not found any problems with producing this number. Each ovary contains about 500,000 eggs and any egg donation leaves the donor with many more for future children for themselves.

Age and eggs

Both a woman's age and ovarian reserve are both known to significantly affect chances of conception, and only looking at a specific cohort or a total average could be misleading. This is why we included the options to select under age 38 or over, and using own eggs or donor, both of which account for varying data respectively.

Clinical pregnancy

Clinical pregnancy is defined as when a heartbeat can be detected in the womb (also known as a pregnancy rate).

Live birth
A live birth is the medical definition for when a baby is born showing any signs of life. It is different from the general birth rate.

Reliability range

The reliability range is a measure of how confident we are that success rates will stay the same in the future. Larger clinics tend to have narrower reliability ranges. It does not mean that their data is more reliable, but simply that there is more of it, which means rates are less likely to be affected by changes in one year's worth of births.