Is antral follicle count a genetic trait?

Abstract

Maternal age of menopause predicts antral follicle count and its decline, indicating a genetic component to this trait.

Age-specific nomogram for the decline in antral follicle count throughout the reproductive period

“…As in previous studies, there is considerable variation in AFC in the population, and age alone only modestly explained the decline in AFC (R 2 ¼ 0.37). The study revealed that the median decline of AFC in normally menstruating women was 2.4% per year, or 0.4 follicles per year, which is lower than values reported in previous studies that found a decrease of 0.95, or 0.97 follicles per year (14,19), or 8.2 % per year (15). Conversely, Ng et al (18) investigated the AFC in a fertile population of 119 women and found a decline of AFC at 0.35 follicles per year, which is similar to results of the present study.…”

“…The majority of studies have investigated AFC in infertile patients (19,27,28) or patients with proven fertility (15,16,18,29). Only two studies have been performed on the general population; however, one was limited to a small number of subjects (n ¼ 31) (14).…”

“…On a second analysis on the same dataset, a model with linear decline in AFC until the age of 43 years followed by an exponential decline with asymptote at zero was used to describe the data (16). The conventional linear model gave the best fit to the AFC in all other studies investigating the relationship between age and AFC (7,14,(18)(19)(20)27).…”

“…In particular the number of small antral follicles decreases with age similarly to the number of primordial follicles (12,13). Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that AFC declines with chronologic age in women (14)(15)(16)(17), although it is still not clear whether this decline has a biphasic (15) or a linear pattern (7,14,(18)(19)(20). Therefore, the sonographic study of AFC could offer valuable information on the status of ovarian reserve, because it reflects the continuous decline of the follicle pool with age.…”

Determinación de la reserva ovárica mediante el recuento de folículos antrales en mujeres en edad reproductiva

“…La gran mayoría de los estudios se han enfocado en investigar el recuento de folículos antrales en pacientes infértiles 2,10,11 . En este estudio evaluamos la reserva ovárica de mujeres en edad reproductiva y con fertilidad probada en población chilena, lo que marca una importante diferencia con otros estudios, y nuestros resultados confirman que existe un declive en el RFA relacionado con la edad, que disminuye en forma constante durante todo el período reproductivo 12,13 .…”