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Spermatozoa
for ICSI
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Until recently the treatment of male infertility was difficult,
unpredictable and had high failure rates. As improvements in
IVF took place, more and more units found that they could often
get the sperm from infertile men to fertilise eggs by a number
of different microsurgerical techniques in the laboratory. In
particular, sorting out the "good" sperm by using special solutions
of medium. Drugs to enhance sperm mobility (such as pentoxyfylline)
have also had some modest success, though the advantages of
such drugs are less clear.
The latest advance has been ICSI,
or "Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection". In this technique, a
single sperm is picked up in an extremely fine glass tube and
injected right into the centre of the egg. Remarkably, this
has resulted in a very high fertilisation rate even in some
of the very worst cases - in men where nobody would ever imagine
that fertilisation could occur.
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Preparation
for ICSI
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All these concerns are real ones, but so far there has been
no indication that the children born as a result of this technique
are anything other than completely healthy. At the time of writing,
well over a thousand babies have been born worldwide after ICSI,
and there is not the slightest evidence that there is any
increased risk of children been born abnormal. Of course
more work is needed, and research is actively going on in our
own laboratories.
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ICSI
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