Egg Timimg
Putting Motherhood on Ice
from Plum - The Pregnancy & Parenting Guide for Women
When do you really need to start paying attention to the biological
clock's alarm? "It's different for every woman," says Karine Chung, MD,
founder and director of the University of Southern California's
Fertility Preservation Program. But in general, your risk factors start
rising in your late 20s and really pick up speed in your mid-to-late
30s. There are no guarantees -- you might lose the ability to conceive
easily at 25, or you might keep it until you are 45.
The key culprit is your eggs. Eggs decline in both quantity and
quality as you age. You're born with a certain number of eggs and that
number shrinks every month when you ovulate. Meanwhile, as the remaining
eggs age, many of them will deteriorate at a cellular level, throwing
the composition of their generic material out of balance.
Taken together, those factors mean that the older you are, the less
likely you are to get pregnant, and the more likely you are to have
complications if you do. The chance that you are infertile is about nine
percent at age 25, more than double that at age 35, and hits 29 percent
by age 40, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.
There are several tests that can estimate your fertility by gauging
the size and quality of your stockpile of eggs. These include testing
your blood levels of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) -- the stuff
that gears up your ovaries to kick out an egg -- and using ultrasound to
assess the number of eggs you have left. New tests, of course, are
always coming out. Repromedix Corp. rolled out a new blood test this
January that measures FSH along with several other hormones. And in May
of 2007, the first do-it-yourself version, made by the Fertell company,
hit drugstore shelves; it measures levels of FSH in a woman's urine.
Chung cautions against relying on them, however. "Your FSH levels
fluctuate month to month," she says, "so just looking at a single test
result without a doctor to put it in perspective could make a woman feel
unjustifiedly reassured or panicked." There's no truth to the myth that
the age of your first period gives a clue to your fertility, says the
ASRM's Dr. Fritz. But if your mother hit menopause at an early age,
you're at risk of that as well.
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