Reproductive Immunology

Today a friend in the UK (whom I "met" via fertility message boards), posted a link to an article in a UK newspaper about a treatment she is starting. I wanted to pass this article along, because I plan to pursue immune testing as a possibility if we have to resort to IVF again.

Dr. Beer was a pioneer in the field of Reproductive Immunology and I talked a little about his book (Is your Body Baby Friendly?) in a previous post. His book is very new, actually published after I started my fertility journey. This was one of the first books on IVF that I found to provide real explanations for couples who continue to have infertility & IVF failures. (You should see all the post-it notes & highlighting in my copy). Most of the patients who go to Dr. Beer's facility (Dr Beer has passed away but the center he founded still provides these treatments) have usually already had 3 or more IVF failures or miscarriages. The article explains in fairly simple terms what the theories & treatments are to prevent another failure so I won't try to explain it myself. I hope to have the testing done before we make another IVF attempt (if IUI does not work within the next two tries, then we will have to move on to IVF again). Unfortunately, Dr. Beers ideas are not accepted by the entire medical community.. so I do not know how feasible it will be. But in my opinion, it would be better to have the tests done than keep trying if something is wrong. Even if all the tests come back all negative, at least you know that is not the cause of your failed attempts. One of the biggest frustrations with infertility is not knowing (at least for me anyway).

The woman in this article wrote about an 8 page introduction in Dr. Beer's book..
Daily Mail - My body tried to kill my baby

I also listed a few quotes from the book.

"Pregnancy risk assessment is advocated in many areas of medicine. We must now add 'immune risk assessment' to find the unfortunate people who end up spending a fortune in money, time and emotion, and get nothing in return. I strongly believe that we can identify these couples even before a first IVF failure."

"Unfortunately, if you mention these ideas to your doctor you must still be prepared for them to laugh at you and not take you seriously. Yet these same doctors would take autoimmunity seriously if it affected your thyroid gland, insulin-producing cells and joints. It's only infertility and recurrent losses that they consider have no biological causes outside of those that can be treated with fertility drugs."

"Studies have reported that many couples consider infertility to be at least as, or more stressful than divorce or the death of a loved one, with up to half of infertile women feeling depressed and anxious" (I've also heard it compared to the stress of dealing with cancer).