hCG Levels: What Do They Tell Us, and Why Should We Care

If you are doing infertility treatments, chances are your doctor will have you test your human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone levels about 12 days after your procedure to determine if you are pregnant. hCG can be detected in one’s urine or blood, but a home pregnancy test will not show you the amount of this hormone, only whether you have enough of it to be considered pregnant. Knowing the actual level on a given date, however, is important if you want to be sure that the pregnancy is going well in its early stages.

Endometrial Scratching

Your in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle has failed, and you do not know why. You had diligently followed your IVF protocol, had several eggs successfully retrieved and fertilized, then screened the embryos for chromosomal abnormalities and had at least one normal embryo. You also have no anatomical anomalies, your uterine lining was triple-layered and thick enough, and the embryo transfer procedure had gone smoothly. Still, your pregnancy test came out negative. What do you do? Repeat the same steps and hope for better luck? If the answer is yes, you might also want to consider endometrial scratching. It could help tilt the scales in the other direction.

My Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS) Results

As a follow-up to my post called “Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS): Why You Should Do It,” I decided to publish the results of my two PGS tests. I hope the information is useful to anyone who wishes to compare her results or get a better idea of how maternal age may affect the quality of embryos.