Elsevier

Fertility and Sterility

Volume 71, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 144-146
Fertility and Sterility

Communications-in-Brief
Monozygotic twinning associated with mechanical assisted hatching

Presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 18–22, 1997.
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Abstract

Objective: To determine the effect of mechanical assisted hatching on the pregnancy rate (PR).

Design: A retrospective comparative analysis of hatched versus nonhatched consecutive assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles.

Setting: A hospital-based ART program.

Patient(s): Patients undergoing ART treatment with assisted hatching (1994–1996) were compared with patients who did not have assisted hatching (1990–1993).

Intervention(s): None.

Main Outcome Measure(s): Pregnancy rate, multiple PR, and rate of monozygotic twinning.

Result(s): With hatching, the clinical PR per ET increased from 25.2% to 37.1% and the multiple PR per ET increased from 6.8% to 13.1%. In the nonhatched series, there were no monozygotic twins compared with eight cases in the hatched series (1.2% per ET).

Conclusion(s): Mechanical assisted hatching increases the PR but concomitantly elevates the rate of multiple gestation and multiple gestation of high order. There is a particularly high risk of monozygotic twinning with mechanical hatching.

Keywords

Mechanical assisted hatching
pregnancy rate
multiple gestation rate
monozygotic twinning

Cited by (0)

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, North Shore University Hospital.

Great Neck Women’s Medical Care, Great Neck, New York.