So reduces the woman’s fertility with age
Age the most important factor
More people wait a long time to have children. Swedish mothers are getting older. At the same time, the woman’s age is the most important factor when it comes to the opportunity to become pregnant with her own eggs.
Fewer and aging eggs
The fact that women’s fertility drops with age depends both on fewer eggs and that the eggs have poorer quality. Here are major individual differences, but for most valleys fertility at 35 and then decrease more substantially after the age of 38.
All eggs are not viable
At the age of 25, the woman’s fertility is best. But even then, on average, only every third egg that releases from the ovaries is of sufficient quality to develop into a child, with individual differences. With age, more and more eggs are losing quality. The risk of chromosome abnormalities increases. At the same time, the eggs’ ability to produce energy, which is required for a normal embryo development, decreases.
Man – one of the least fertile animals
For example, in mice and rats, almost 100 percent of all eggs in the female’s ovaries are fertilized. Women have fewer functioning eggs and a fertile period that ends in the middle of their lives. That is, with menopause. The ovaries are the organized organ that ages fastest.
Nobody knows why nature has posted it that way. But there are theories that evolution has ensured that people get a fairly large amount of offspring. That we would not be able to have as many children as, for example, rodents.
Much required for it to become a child
More and more people are seeking help from healthcare to get pregnant. To succeed with IVF, that is, conception outside the uterus, the woman’s age is the most important factor. The age of the man also has significance, but to a much lesser extent because sperm do not age as the eggs do but are continuously newly formed in the testicles.
Both men and women’s fertility are adversely affected by, among other things, smoking, obesity and various environmental factors such as air pollution and hormone -disrupting substances. Medical treatments such as cell toxins can also impair fertility.
Source: The facts have been developed with the help of Pauliina Damdimopoulou, associate professor of endocrine physiology at the Karolinska Institute.
