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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 PGD for Gender Selection?
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Dr. Daniel Potter, HRC Fertility: The primary method of gender selection is in vitro fertilization
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with pre-implantation genetic screening of the embryos.
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And when we do this, we can check the embryos for all 24 chromosomes and also know the gender of the embryo,
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and we can select just a single embryo of the desired gender, and place that embryo back, and have a very high pregnancy rate.
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So, you know, when we look at all 24 chromosomes with the PGD, we can tell for sure that the embryo is normal or not,
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and it turns out that when in vitro fertilization doesn't work, one of the primary reasons it doesn't work
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is because the embryos that are being transferred are not normal.
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So, knowing that they're normal is very helpful.
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There are other PGD techniques, FISH being the chief among them, where you can look at the X and the Y chromosome,
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and they are very accurate for selecting gender.
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However, they do not do any good at all in terms of embryo screening.
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If we use the 24-chromosome technology, we can put back, you know, as I said, a single embryo.
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The gender, you know, specificity with that technique in our hands has been 100 percent.
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So, what we do with this technology is we give the female medicine so that she makes multiple eggs
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rather than the single egg that she makes in a normal cycle.
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And then we remove those eggs, and that's done through the vagina using a needle guided by ultrasound.
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The patient's asleep for this, so they don't feel anything or remember anything.
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Once we have the eggs out, we take them to the laboratory and we fertilize them with sperm,
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and at that point the fertilized eggs are; you know, we call them embryos.
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Technically, they're actually pre-embryos. But we call them embryos.
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And so they start off at a single cell and they will divide to the eight-cell stage,
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and at that point we can remove one of the cells and, you know, using various technologies,
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analyze the cell to determine what the chromosomal content is of that cell and then, you know,
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use that information to transfer just the embryos that are healthy and that are normal.
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