Understanding success rates

Success rates can sometimes be presented in ways that are difficult to interpret. When considering treatment, patients generally want to know their chances of success throughout all the stages of their treatment. This is best represented by looking at the success rate ‘per cycle started’.

Success rates have also been presented ‘per embryo transferred’ more recently. However, this excludes patients who do not reach the embryo transfer stage, and it also does not take into account the requirement to transfer two embryos (in keeping with the professional guidelines) in patients of advanced maternal age or those who have had treatment failures before.

Why we present our success rates per treatment cycle started? read more

At the ARGC, we present our success rates per treatment cycle started as we believe this is the appropriate measure of success for ALL patients throughout ALL stages of their treatment read more.

Mr Taranissi, Medical Director of the ARGC, explains how success rates are reported in the video below.

Other clinicians agree that not all published IVF success rates reflect the same information see more

“The HFEA [Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority] records success rate per embryo transfer, but that in itself is misleading, because a large number of women start a cycle but never get to the embryo transfer stage, either because their ovaries don’t respond or because the eggs don’t fertilise.” read more



Video guide to show how to search for published clinic success rates per cycle started on the HFEA website