If you don’t yet fully understand what the ovarian reserve is and how it is determined, this post is the right one for you.
First of all, let’s remember: women lose eggs all throughout their live. On the day a woman is born she has on average 200,000 eggs. Then, as she grows older her eggs diminish in both quantity and quality. So the older you are the less eggs you have, or the smaller your ovarian reserve.
Generally a high ovarian reserve is good – the chances of getting pregnant are high – a low ovarian reserve on the other hand is bad news, because this chances of getting pregnant are low.
How can you tell what your ovarian reserve is? You really can’t tell accurately – there are different methods of testing and evaluating your ovarian reserve, but none of them is 100% precise. Here some methods to determine a woman’s ovarian reserve:
- age: the older you are, the smaller your ovarian reserve
- FSH (follicle stimulating hormone): this is the hormone that “makes” mature eggs so to speak.
- LH
- estradiol (E2)
- progesterone (P4)
- inhibin-B
- transvaginal ultrasound
This time we’re only going to look at FSH, because I think it’s the most significant.
There’s a way to “measure” your “baseline FSH level”. The baseline FSH level is basically how much of that hormone you have in your body on the 3rd day of your menstrual circle.
Now your brain basically tries to “keep you fertile” – if you have lots of fertile eggs it just needs to produce a little bit of FSH. But if that’s not the case and you have a low estrogen level then your brain tries to “make up for that” with producing lots of FSH so that more estrogen and more fertile eggs get produced. Once you enter menopause (when you run out of eggs in your ovaries) what happens is that your brain still tries to “keep you fertile”, thus pumping out lots of FSH into your body. So that means the higher your baseline FSH level, the lower your fertility.
Your baseline FSH level can be determined by a blood sample.
If you have questions just post a comment here.
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