What Are The Various Fertility Treatment Options for Women With PCOS?

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  Weight Loss For Restarting Ovulation

Many women with PCOS deal with obesity and weight gain. The reason is PCOS significantly affects how your body is going to process insulin, thus causing weight gain. The most common reason why women with PCOS cannot conceive is their inability to ovulate. This is quite common among women who have PCOS and are overweight. Thus, the best way to prevent this from happening is to lose some weight to restart the ovulation process. Losing 5%-10% of your weight is sufficient to bring your menstrual cycles back on track.

• Diet And Exercise

Eating a nutritious and healthy diet for women dealing with PCOS is highly recommended. One reason is that you don’t get overweight; another is to regulate your insulin level. However, what diet is most-effective for PCOS is still a debatable topic. While some nutritionists recommend eating a low-carb diet, others find that low-carb foods have no significant advantage on your PCOS. Thus, the best thing to do is to eat nutrient-rich foods. You also need to take adequate proteins and limit the sugar foods. Avoid processed and junk food at all times.

Although diet and exercise alone can’t help you get pregnant, a healthy lifestyle is still an essential factor that can help your fertility treatments to work better. Regular exercise also has a crucial role in lessening your PCOS symptoms. You can go for a mix of walking and adopting a healthy diet to make your menstrual cycle regular.

• Medications

Many women with PCOS need regular medications for treating their symptoms under control and assist them to conceive. For the best medication, you should consult with a gynecologist or endocrinologist.

• Fertility Procedures

If the prescribed medication does not work for you, you might have to resort to other fertility procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or in vitro maturation (IVM). IVF is the standard fertility procedure where fertility drugs are injected to stimulate the ovaries for producing a great number of mature eggs. After that, the eggs are retrieved from the ovaries through an egg retrieval procedure. Then these eggs are placed with sperm, and if everything goes as planned, the sperm would be able to fertilize some of these eggs. After that, the fertilized eggs are kept for 3-4 days, and one or two of them are transferred to the uterus through an embryo transfer method. You can get the pregnancy test done after two-three weeks to ensure the procedure has been successful or not.

However, a significant risk associated with IVF, especially for women with PCOS, is overstimulation of the ovaries. This is why another procedure known as IVM is preferred over IVF. The full form of IVM is in vitro maturation, where you are not given outrageous fertility drugs to make your ovaries produce mature eggs. In IVM, you only receive a few doses of fertility drugs. The medical professional will retrieve immature eggs and mature them in labs.

Although it is unlikely for women with PCOS to need an egg donor to conceive, there are situations when women suffer from various other fertility issues, making them go with the option of an egg donor. In case women have undergone certain procedures like ovarian drilling and ovarian wedge resection for treating their PCOS, they might need an egg donor out of compulsion. It is one of the significant reasons why surgical treatments for PCOS are not recommended.

Conclusion:

In case you have PCOS, it does not mean you cannot get pregnant. Although it might take some time and effort; however, it is absolutely possible. You must talk with a good doctor for advice on the most effective methods to treat PCOS for restarting and regulating ovulation so that you can conceive a pregnancy as soon as possible.