Infertility Infertility refers to the failure to achieve pregnancy after 1 year of regular unprotected intercourse.1 The condition has severe emotional and social repercussions, negatively impacts sexual health, and remarkably degrades the overall quality of life of the affected individuals. It is ranked highly in terms of burden of disease and prevalence, and exacts enormous costs to society.2,3 A methodological study4 conducted on individuals in Western Siberia showed the overall infertility rate to be 16.7%. To delve further, Boivin and colleagues5 pooled data from population-based surveys and showed the prevalence of infertility to range from 3.5-16.7% and 6.9-9.3% in the developed and developing nations, respectively, with overall female infertility prevalence to be 72.4 million (figure 1). As a consequence of the high prevalence rates, reproductive medicine is rapidly advancing, bringing in new possibilities to this burgeoning area of research.6 Techniques that aid in conception such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in-vitro…
Assisted reproductive technology: An overview The advent of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in the 19th century was hailed as major obstetrical achievement in the management of infertility. The first child conceived with frozen-thawed sperm was born in 1953, and the first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) baby in 1978. This was followed by the introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in 1992, which overcame the major obstacles pertaining to male infertility. In the successive decades, the technologies continued to develop apace opening up new paradigms of parenthood. The timeline of major ART milestones (1978-2004) is depicted in figure 1. The building blocks of progress have been assembled over the past years by researchers, whose core objective has been to abate all seemingly insurmountable obstacles to conception in infertile individuals. Despite the initial set back in 1980s, researchers continued to refine the techniques in ART, and expanded the options for infertility management. Today,…
