IVF-patients with nonmale factor "to ICSI" or "not to ICSI" that is the question?

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Buserelin and Follicle Stimulating Hormone.

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) guarantees high fertilization rates and could theoretically lead to higher implantation rates as well.

Furthermore injection into oocyte creates a hole in the zona pellucida similar to the procedure of assisted hatching.

Who Took Part

The study group was 44 patients.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, women only.

Open randomized prospective study according to the rules "Good Clinical Practice" with informed consent of the patients and institutional review board approval.

Ninety-one consecutively seen patients with tubal infertility or hostile cervical mucus were randomized to undergo either ICSI (44 patients) or IVF (45 patients).

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Because people in this Buserelin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

In two patients fertilization of oocytes failed and so a repeated ICSI had to be performed.

All these patients were stimulated with the same protocol, using the gonadotropin releasing hormone-agonist (GnRH-a) buserelin acetate in an ultrashort flair-up protocol together with pure follicle stimulating hormone (rFSH).

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Body Mass Index, Buserelin, Embryo Implantation, Embryo, Mammalian, Estradiol, Fertilization and Follicle Stimulating Hormone.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Buserelin and Follicle Stimulating Hormone in 44 patients.

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2001 (Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the related Buserelin library page, all human trials.