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Maternal Age and Oocyte Competence

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Abstract

There is a continued trend to delay childbearing to advanced maternal ages. Demographics show that in virtually all Western European countries and the United States mean age to child-bearing tends still to increase (Stephen, 2000). An extreme example is the Netherlands where the mean age of women delivering their first child rose from 24.6 years in 1970 to 29.1 years in 1999 (te Velde and Pearson, 2002). Many couples are still unaware of the fact that advanced maternal age is a the major factor in female subfecundity and infertility, and that even the best medical treatments cannot postpone menopause and infertility related to the depletion of the follicle pool. In such cases, oocyte donation is the only currently available option. To account for the increased demand of reproductively aged women to conceive a child in their late thirties or over 40 years, preferentially with their own oocytes, it has become a major challenge in assisted reproduction to assess fertility in individual couples, predict competence of individual oocytes from a heterogeneous population of oocytes retrieved from a reproductively aged woman, and counsel and treat older subfertile patients adequately.

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  1. Fakultät für Biologie Gentechnologie/Mikrobiologie, Universität Bielefeld, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Ursula Eichenlaub-Ritter & Fengyun Sun

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  1. Ursula Eichenlaub-Ritter
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  1. Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Jonathan Van Blerkom

  2. Colorado Reproductive Endocrinology, Rose Medical Center, Denver, Colorado, USA

    Jonathan Van Blerkom

  3. Cardiff Assisted Reproduction Unit, University Hospital of Wales, Heath Park Cardiff, Wales, UK

    Linda Gregory

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Eichenlaub-Ritter, U., Sun, F. (2004). Maternal Age and Oocyte Competence. In: Van Blerkom, J., Gregory, L. (eds) Essential IVF. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8955-0_8

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