Intrauterine human chorionic gonadotropin infusion in oocyte donors promotes endometrial synchrony and induction of early decidual markers for stromal survival: a randomized clinical trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in the context of endometriosis, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Reverse transcription of total RNA from endometrial biopsies generated cDNA, which was used for analysis in the endometrial receptivity array (ERA; n = 5/group) or quantitative RT-PCR to determine relative expression of ESR1, PGR, C3 and NOTCH1.

Immunostaining for ESR1, PGR, α-SMA, C3 and NOTCH1 was performed to determine their tissue localization.

Why It Was Studied

Does a single intrauterine infusion of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) at the time corresponding to a Day 3 embryo transfer in oocyte donors induce favorable molecular changes in the endometrium for embryo implantation?

This study differs from their previous work in the hCG-treated non-human primate along with clinical studies in infertile patients.

Who Took Part

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

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Endometrial biopsies were performed 2 days later, followed by either RNA isolation or tissue fixation in formalin and paraffin embedding.

Tissue sections were stained with hematoxylin and eosin followed by blinded staging analysis for dating of endometrial glands and stroma.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Biomarkers, Chorionic Gonadotropin, Decidua, Embryo Transfer, Endometrium, Models, Biological and Oocyte Retrieval.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Notch, complement, controlled ovarian stimulation, decidualization, embryo implantation and endometrial receptivity.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in people with endometriosis.

Results are reported in around 8 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (Human reproduction (Oxford, England)), a journal based in England.

More context: the hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) compound page, Endometriosis research.