Any IVF clinic which doesn't routinely transfer blastocysts is a bad IVF clinic

I know this is a provocative statement and is going to raise a lot of hackles, because most IVF clinics in India don't do day 5 transfers. While quite a few do day 3 transfers, many still continue doing day 2 transfers.We used to do day 2 and day 3 transfers in the past as well, but the technology has become so good that we can routinely do day 5 transfers for everyone who comes to us. I think any clinic which doesn't do, this is actually being irresponsible. Not only are they depriving their patient of the best chance of getting pregnant, they're also signaling that they're not very confident about their ability or expertise or of their embryologist or IVF lab to be able to go grow embryos to blastocyst stage.Now, there's no doubt that the blastocyst transfer has a much higher implantation rate than day 2 or day 3 transfers. This has been proven multiple times in many research studies all over the world. I am quite happy for someone to challenge this statement by providing me with figures to the contrary. Now, I'm not saying that day 2 and day 3 embryos don't achieve pregnancies. Of course, they do, but they would have achieved the pregnancy, even if you've grown these embryos to day 5, so I don't see any advantage to transferring at day 2 or day 3.In fact, there are multiple disadvantages. For one thing, you often have to transfer more embryos to achieve the same pregnancy rates, so you have end up with a higher risk of having multiple pregnancies which can actually cause m...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs