Women who are afraid that they will never have a second baby because they haven't conceived within three or four years of their first child's birth were given heartening news today. (Monday 26 June) New research shows that most under 35-year-olds will almost certainly conceive without fertility treatment if they are prepared to wait.
"The real chance of not being able to have a second spontaneous pregnancy is actually very low except for women over 35," Mr Renè Eijkemans told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Bologna, Italy.
He said that secondary infertility accounts for nearly a third of all the cases in first-line fertility clinics. Although these patients are, on average, older than women who have never had a child, they actually have a better chance of spontaneous pregnancy.
Mr Eijkemans and colleagues from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and the University Hospital in Utrecht came to that conclusion after studying the records of over 2,300 Canadian women born between 1850 and 1900 in a region of Quebec renowned for the high number of children in a family -- nine per married woman on average.
The research team found that although approximately 3% of the under 20s, 5% of 21-25 year-olds, 10% of 26-30 year-olds, 11% of 31-35 year-olds and 42% of over 35s had not conceived their second baby three years after the first birth, over 98% in total had conceived within 10 years. More than half the women who didn't conceive within three years succeeded in doing so within the next three years.
"This indicates that the probability of eventually conceiving a second child is very high for young women although chances do decrease with age, with second conceptions being harder for women over 35. Yet many women are being treated within three or four years of trying for a second baby.
"When you look at our findings it seems appropriate to impose a bar on treatment for a certain period of time since the first child or, in these days of planned families, from the time that parents start trying for a second child. But we should give a clear indication that treatment may be appropriate after a longer period and have a 'grey' time zone in which treatment is not clearly indicated but the patients' preference may be decisive. The exact duration of these 'waiting' periods will of course depend on a woman's age and other prognostic factors."
Note: Programme number: O-072
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