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(text on screen): Ask the Expert
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Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source
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When and how does fertility decline?
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Eric Flisser, M.D., Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York: So, it's a difficult reality that human reproduction is limited.
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And, primarily, it's limited because the number of eggs that a woman has is a finite resource.
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And even since before she was born, a woman is losing her eggs.
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At the peak, a woman has about five to six million eggs.
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By the time she's born, there are about two to three million left.
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And then by the time she reaches puberty, even before she's ovulated even a single egg, there are only about 500,000 left.
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So, about 90 percent of all of the eggs that a woman starts with are gone by the time she reaches puberty.
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And with only one exception that I can think of, there's really no way to stop that loss of eggs.
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Whether a woman is pregnant or she's on the birth control pill, that process is basically unstoppable.
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And as the number of eggs dwindles, the quality of those eggs gets worse as well.
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So, not only are there fewer remaining, but they don't work as well as they had when a woman was younger.
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And that is, primarily, the major obstacle to fertility when there are no other medical problems.
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Female fertility certainly reaches its peak somewhere in the, probably, late teens and twenties,
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and then begins to take a significant decline in the mid-30s, and certainly by 37, 38 an even more significant decline.
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And it's basically impossible for us to predict who will get pregnant or when they will get pregnant.
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We can only observe the population at large and see that as women get older, fewer and fewer are getting pregnant at any given time.
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If, after 12 months of trying, in a woman who's younger than 35, or after six months of trying in a woman who's over 35,
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conception has not occurred, that would be an appropriate time to see a reproductive endocrinologist for a full fertility evaluation.
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(text on screen): Ask the Expert
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Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source
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