INDICATIONS

Older women may be candidates to this new procedure. As was discussed before, patients over 38 may even produce morphologically normal oocytes and embryos, nevertheless their implantation and pregnancy rates are extremely low. Bad quality oocytes seem to be na intrinsic quality of this patients’ group, which could be due to cytoplasmic quality deterioration. Competent cytoplasm tranfer from younger women’s oocytes may enhance oocytary quality and, consequently, enhance implantetion potential of resulting embryos.

Another patient group is that one in which, regardless of age, do not produce good quality embryos and do not get pregnant in spite of various attempts. These patients’ embryos usually present many fragments and/or slow cleavage and/or cytoplasmic granulosity, among other aberrations. Most these alterations seem to ber caused by bad quality cytoplasm and, thus, transferring a younger and healthier oocyte cytoplasm may improve the embryo quality and, hence, increase pregnancy chances. Although cytoplasm transfer hasn’t been performed in high scale, initial results seem promising. There are reports involving women submitted to the technique, of whom 25% became pregnant. These preliminary data increase the hope about the future of this procedure. However, before final conclusions be drawn, a higher number of patients must be treated in order to correctly estimate the usefulness of this technique.

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