EASC-101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Degenerative Disease, Prenatal Diagnosis, Clomifene
8 Apr 2016
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A woman may stop menstruating (called secondary amenorrhea) or menstruate irregularly (called oligomenorrhea) or just fail to ovulate but menstruate normally. Many fertility problems can be reversed by lifestyle changes, psychotherapy (if the cause is depression or an eating disorder, for example), or failing the above, by drug treatment such as clomiphene or its generic versions. Clomiphene is an estrogen antagonist which by several feedback mechanisms promotes the maturation of ovarian follicles restoring fertility; sometimes too effectively as 5-10% of clomiphene-induced pregnancies are twins (compared with about 1% of normal pregnancies). In ivf only a small number of sperm are needed because no long-distance migration is involved. You may want to use these for class if students are competent enough. In an alternative procedure, oocytes are harvested from the woman as for ivf, but they are placed directly into her fallopian tubes, along with sperm from the partner. Fertilization then takes place in the fallopian tubes.
