“The last time I gave myself an injection, the needle held heroin,” writes Healthland’s Maia Szalavitz in an honest, insightful essay that appears on the new addiction and recovery-themed site The Fix. Twenty-two years after …
IVF
Can Patients Get Around the Exorbitant New Cost of a Pregnancy Drug?
The cost of a drug used to prevent premature birth in high-risk mothers will rise from around $10 per dose to $1,500, now that the FDA has approved a branded version of the medication.
Stress Doesn’t Hurt Chances of Success with IVF
Of all the factors that infertile couples worry about, they can now stop worrying about one: worry. It turns out that stress and tension, while detrimental to overall health, may have little impact on couples’ chances of …
Family MattersPregnancy
Uterus May Be More Important than Egg Quality for Healthy Babies
The health of a woman’s uterus seems to trump the quality of her eggs when it comes to a baby conceived via fertility treatment being born full-term and at a normal weight.
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You’re Kidding! Medical Clown Increases Pregnancy Rates with IVF
A study of 229 Israeli women undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to treat infertility found that a 15-minute visit from a trained “medical clown” immediately after the embryos were placed in the womb increased the chance of …
Family MattersPregnancy
Judge: Octomom’s Doc Should Continue Seeing IVF Patients
Say there’s a doctor who used 16 eggs to create 14 embryos and then transferred a dozen of them to a woman’s womb, where they eventually yielded eight babies. Should he be allowed to continue seeing patients?
Family MattersPediatric Genetics
Customized Kids: Parents Abort Twin Boys in Quest for Daughter
Of course, every parent-in-waiting hopes for a healthy baby, but most — whether they admit it or not — have a preference for one sex over the other. But to what extremes would you go to make it happen?
CommittedInfertility
Predicting IVF Success: There’s an App for That
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a money-, time-, and dignity- gobbling exercise with lower than a third chance of success.
Study: BPA Exposure May Reduce Chances of IVF
Toxins love to get you while you’re young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it’s mature and comparatively fixed.
Sale Alert! Holiday Savings on Sperm
While it’s far from a traditional gift, vials of sperm may be at the top of the list for couples and single women facing infertility. A sale on sperm from two branches of the world’s largest group of sperm banks could at least …