Outcomes From Treatment of Infertility With Natural Procreative Technology in an Irish General Practice

Abstract

Objectives: We evaluated outcomes in couples treated for infertility with natural procreative technology (NaProTechnology, NPT), a systematic medical approach for optimizing physiologic conditions for conception in vivo, from an Irish general practice.Methods: All couples receiving treatment from 2 NPT-trained family physicians between February 1998 and January 2002 were studied. The main outcome was live birth, and secondary outcomes included conceptions and multiple births. Crude proportions and adjusted life-table proportions were calculated per 100 couples.Results: A total of 1239 couples had an initial consult for NPT, of which 1072 had been trying for at least a year to conceive and initiated treatment. The average female age was 35.8 years, the mean duration of attempting to conceive was 5.6 years, 24% had a prior birth, and 33% had previously attempted treatment with assisted reproductive technology (ART). All couples were taught to identify the fertile days of the menstrual cycle with the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, and most received additional medical treatment, including clomiphene (75%). In life-table analysis, the cumulative proportion of first live births for those completing up to 24 months of NPT treatment was 52.8 per 100 couples. The crude proportion was 25.5. Younger couples and couples without previous ART attempts had higher rates of live birth. Among live births, there were 4.6% twin births.

The Medical Home, Health Services, and Clinical Family Medicine Research

“…1,9,11,[13][14][15] Thank you to all! This issue epitomizes why we are always so impressed with the variety of funding sources, the level of collaborative work (across institutions and countries), and the number of individual family physicians in various practice settings that participate in research to advance the science of family medicine.…”

“…Here we highlight studies that provide new/ clarifying results, [1][2][3][4][5] mixed results, [6][7][8] and unexpected results. 6,7 Several reports provide information and data on major tenets of family medicine: Clark et al 6 studied continuity between prenatal care and infant care; Mainous et al 5 described the long-term personal history importance to future risk of disease; and Merenstein and Merenstein 9 provide patient feedback on the importance of the doctor-patient relationship.…”

NaProTECHNOLOGY and Conscientious OB/GYN Medicine

“…Common treatments for these pathologies include induction or stimulation of ovulation, medications to enhance cervical mucus, and hormonal support in the luteal phase. When these NPT medical approaches to infertility were used in a study of 1,239 infertile couples, they resulted in a live birth rate similar to that of cohort ART treatments [3].…”

Epigenetic: A new approach to etiology of infertility

“…1 The male factors in infertility could be the abnormality of sperm count (oligozoospermia), the sperm motility (asthenozoospermia), and the sperm morphology (teratozoospermia) or combination, as a result of disruption in spermatogenesis. Epigenetics becomes one of the important roles in the regulation of male fertility, starts from spermatogenesis until embryo development.…”

“…1 Identifying factors involved in the etiology of infertility is a necessary. There are several approaches to understanding the etiology of infertility, one of which is epigenetics.…”