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(text on screen): Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source
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Ask the Experts
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What is the correlation between a woman's age and her fertility?
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Dr. Kimberly Thompson, South Florida Institute for Reproductive Medicine: Age impacts fertility
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primarily by affecting the number and quality of eggs that a woman has.
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Over time, the woman loses more eggs.
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We're born with all the eggs we're ever gonna have; many women don't realize that.
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So, over time, we have fewer eggs until we finally run, out and that is menopause.
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Over time, as the eggs age, more of them also develop susceptibility to abnormalities.
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So, more of the eggs, even if they're fertilized by a sperm, may not grow enough to implant; to give a positive pregnancy test.
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We also see more miscarriages as a woman ages, because of genetic abnormalities that show up later.
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It's also recommended for a woman to consider doing an amniocentesis if she's over 35, or chorionic villus sampling,
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some form of additional testing as she gets older, because there are more chances of a genetic abnormality in the baby
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since only some of them will miscarry on their own.
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Women have their optimal fertility when we're in our later teens, early 20s.
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Even as soon as 30, you can start to measure some decline in fertility.
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Over 35 is in particular when we get more concerned that it starts vary much more
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whether a woman will have difficulty getting pregnant, or become more susceptible to a miscarriage.
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Women, in particular, over 40, have much lower chances of conceiving or can take much longer to get pregnant
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On average, a woman who's young, who's perhaps 30 years old, will have about a 20 percent chance of conceiving
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if she has unprotected intercourse in a cycle.
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Once a woman is 40, even if everything is working properly in her system and in the man's reproductive system,
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the chances of conceiving in a particular month go down to approximately 10 percent.
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By age 42, it drops to closer to 5 percent per month.
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Over 42, it's hard to even get specific numbers, because the pregnancy rate per month is quite low.
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Obviously, over many months, that can still add up to a very real chance that a woman could get pregnant.
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But since the numbers of good eggs continue to decline over time, that probability of conceiving is getting lower.
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And some women can have menopause as soon as early 40s, and that's actually still considered just the early end of normal range.
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So, many women will have trouble if they are waiting into their later 30s or early 40s.
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Not many women are really aware of how much age affects fertility, and we spend so much of our young years
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trying to avoid getting pregnant at the wrong time, and avoiding catching any infections.
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And when it's suddenly time, where the woman's in the right circumstance to have a baby,
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she can really be having difficulty and be caught quite by surprise that she has no idea that her egg supply has been declining.
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And, obviously, there are only certain times when a woman may be ready to have a baby in her life.
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But, definitely, the younger that we have children (later teens; early 20s), is actually when nature designed us to have the best fertility.
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But socially, now, life is complicated with school and work and being with the right person,
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or deciding to do it on a woman's own terms as a single mom,
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that it's not always easy just to follow what nature designed our best fertility as.
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(text on screen): Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source
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