ICSI vs. IVF

laurenlalap · February 2016

I'm sure this has been discussed 1000x but can anyone tell me why they went with ICSI vs IVF?
My clinic says 99.9% of people choose ICSI, but I've reading that there *can* be a higher rate of birth defects and that it's usually for used male factor.
My husband does not have male factor IF, so I'm wondering if we should skip ICSI and just do traditional IVF?
I was really surprised to hear that 99.9% chose ICSI, when it's an additional $2,400 at my clinic... (but I guess when you're dropping $18,000, $2,400 more isn't that insane) : )

TIA!

tripledaggerWed95976 · February 2016

At the place I did mine they don't offer the option of doing IVF without ICSI. I have never heard of the higher rate of birth defects with ICSI. I'm really glad we did ICSI because we only ended up with 5 mature eggs... 4 of which fertilized- 2 of which made it to blasts. So, I wouldn't have chanced it with not doing ICSI even if we were given the option

rachlee2010 · February 2016

My dr said he usually only recommends icsi for people with male factor infertility which we also didn't have but he recommended it for us because it raises the fertilization rate by a good 10-15% and with my DOR and only getting a few eggs we wanted as many fertilized as we could

AandDM2014 · February 2016

There is no such thing as ICSI versus IVF. ICSI is an extra service you can get along with your IVF. With ICSI they take 1 sperm, cut off a bit of its tail and force it into 1 egg. I know that sounds terrible, but it doesn't hurt the sperm or egg. The only time it leads to higher birth defects is if there is already a problem with the sperm. Completely normal and healthy sperm will not have a higher birth defect rate using ICSI.

We don't have any MFI but my doc recommended doing half of my eggs with ICSI and half without, just to make sure some of them got fertilized (it was our first attempt at IVF and we didn't know how it would go). ICSI fertilized 6 eggs and non ICSI (aka the sperm and the eggs got mixed together in a dish and had a little fun) fertilized 5. He said that if we have to do another stim round and retrieval we can skip ICSI and just let them fertilize naturally.

I hope this helps answer your question!

mskeenan · February 2016

At my clinic they do ICSI for everyone - regardless of diagnosis . We don't have MFI - but all I know is that all of our mature eggs were fertilized successfully .

KLake42 · February 2016

ICSI is mandatory at my clinic if you're using frozen donor sperm, which I am.

Since I don't expect many eggs, it makes sense to me to use it.

MelD17011 · February 2016

we decided to do ICSI because of I have unexplained infertility - so we did everything to increase our odds

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