hfea has £3.4M treasure chest

The UK fertility watchdog, the HFEA (Human Fertility and Embryology Authority) has £3.4million of unspent funds, according to figures.

Meanwhile thousands of woman are being refused free IVF treatment, due to budget cutbacks. The surplus cash could pay for approximately 850 cycles of treatment.

Multiply Magazine advisory panel member, Clare Lewis-Jones -from Infertility Network UK - has called for the HFEA's surplus cash pile to be reinvested for the benefit of patients.

Last year 45,000 women underwent IVF treatment in the UK, 60 per cent went privately. Read the full story.

DO YOU REALLY NEED FERTILITY TREATMENT?

Geoffrey Sher, co-founder and Executive Medical Director of the Sher Institutes for Reproductive Medicine (SIRM), has written a fascinating blog, about a study published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility which claims that about 44% of 7, 000 Australian women aged 28-36 years who said they had experienced difficulty conceiving for at least a year, subsequently achieved a pregnancy without having to undergo any type of fertility treatment. 

The authors concluded that almost half of “infertile” women in this age category probably don't need treatment.

But, says Dr. Sher, it's not as simple or straightforward as that.

ENODMETRIOSIS BREAKTHROUGH

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have, for the first time, described the genetic basis of endometriosis. The discovery of a new gene mutation provides hope for new screening methods. The findings are published in the online issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine. The condition is often hereditary and is found in 5%-15% of women of reproductive age, affecting over 70 million women worldwide.

Although the disorder has been studied for many years, its exact cause and how it develop has remained unclear. The Yale team is the first to identify a cause of this common and previously little understood disease. "This mutation potentially represents a new therapeutic target for endometriosis as well as a basis of potential screening methods to determine who is at risk for developing endometriosis," said senior author Hugh S. Taylor, M.D