Female fertility – Egg quality from a Chinese medicine perspective.

Egg quality relates to the total number of eggs that are normal vs abnormal. 

Egg quality is important when trying to conceive as poor egg quality will result in poor embryo quality and can result in poor implantation and pregnancy outcomes. Poor egg quality makes the risk of miscarriage higher and the response to IVF ovarian stimulation not as good. 

How to test egg quality 

There’s no test for egg quality. The only way to know if an egg is chromosomally normal is to fertilize it, and, if fertilization is successful, to perform a genetic test on the embryo.

Having said that conventional medicine uses certain markers to identify issues that could be present with egg quality.

These include :

1. Your age (Because DNA damage is inevitable in older eggs)
2. Your hormone markers – specifically: FSH, Estrodiol and AMH. These hormones can indicate things such as your egg reserve, how the body is stimulating egg production and maintaining healthy eggs

To assess egg quality from a Chinese medicine point of view your practitioner is assessing the quality of your vital essence (genetics), your kidney’s kidneys (yin and yang) as well as the environment that the eggs are growing in. 

For example, if someone’s essence is an issue – we might see prematurely greying hair or hair loss, a drying up of the body or severe dehydration body fluids, scanty or very light periods and perhaps tiredness and exhaustion 

Or from an environmental perspective if there is for example, blood stasis in the uterus (maybe something like endometriosis) then this can block the blood flow to developing oocytes and could impact egg quality.

So, our focus is always on improving all aspects of health such as your virality and essence as well as the environment within the uterus.

We assess every person individually and we might sue tools such as herbs, supplements, dietary therapy, heat therapy such as moxa, acupuncture, castor oil packs and recommend lifestyle changes or things you can do at home.

And of course please remember that an eggs lifecycle is 90 days, so if you are doing IVF you should start your acupuncture treatment 3 months prior to your first IVF round and if your trying to conceive naturally its worth starting three months before you start trying.