LI Doctor: Fertility Planning, Infertility Treatments More Effective

GARDEN CITY, NY — Last week was National Infertility Awareness Week, and one fertility specialist from Nassau County wants women to know that advancements in the field mean women have more options when it comes to planning for children and treating infertility.

Dr. Michael Zinger is a reproductive endocrinologist at RMA Long Island IVF, an IVF and fertility practice with six Long Island locations. He tells Patch that the practice is seeing an increasing number of women visit who are interested in freezing their eggs for later conception.

"The technology for this has improved and now it works really well," he explained. Before recently, the success rates of pregnancies with frozen eggs was low and now the success rates mirror the same rates when using never-frozen eggs.

"Women want to keep their options open, women in their thirties who aren't ready to conceive now but want to be able to later."

Dr. Zinger says he's seeing more women come in for initial evaluation visits, women who are curious to know their ovarian reserve, or egg supply. He says that although recent advancements help make more interventions viable, time does matter.

"Under age 35, one egg freezing treatment gives a 75 percent change of conceiving, while over age 40, it's down to 17 percent."

For those women under 35 who are actively trying to conceive, a rule of thumb is that after one year of actively trying without a successful pregnancy, schedule a workup with a fertility doctor. For women over age 35, however, Dr. Zinger recommends only waiting six months.

"After age 35, every year counts. Unfortunately, there's still a bit of a myth out there about how easy it is to conceive as women get older," partly due to some of the successes of reproductive medicine itself, he cautions.

"If you're over 40 and decide you want to get pregnant," he said, "make an appointment the day you decide, and get evaluated so no time is lost."

The good news, he says, is that there are very few causes of infertility that can't be addressed with modern medicine, as long as there are viable eggs.

And with insurance now routinely covering in vitro fertilization (IVF) even more couples are able to overcome infertility, he added.