Nearly 150 mums, dads and children gathered on Sunday, July 19, to say a big thankyou to City Fertility Centre Gold Coast’s IVF clinic as it celebrated its 10th anniversary.
Medical director of City Fertility Centre Gold Coast, Dr Andrew Davidson, said he was delighted so many former patients, babies and children came along to celebrate the milestone.
“We first opened our doors with three specialists and we have now grown to six specialists consulting from seven locations to keep up with demand,” Dr Davidson said.
“While becoming a parent is easy for some, for one in six couples it is more difficult.
“In our 10 years we have helped over 500 babies come into the world.”
Dr Davidson said people with infertility problems today had a much better chance than a decade ago of achieving a pregnancy with the help of a specialist.
“IVF treatment options have continued to advance over the past 10 years with several significant advancements, including vitrification (rapid freezing), blastocyst embryo transfers, advanced embryo selection, and advancements in culture media systems,” Dr Davidson said.
He said techniques such as vitrification gave IVF providers the ability to rapidly freeze eggs and embryos, then successfully thaw them at a later date with far superior success rates than were previously the case.
“Ten years ago we would never have thought that frozen female eggs would be able to be routinely thawed and result in pregnancies, but with vitrification this is now regularly being achieved,” he said.
“In addition, the ability to test embryos for a vast array of conditions that may have been causing infertility issues, then select the most viable ones to try and achieve a positive pregnancy, is also a big advance.”
According to the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit’s Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) in Australia & New Zealand 2012 report, 70,082 ART treatment cycles were performed in the two countries in (64,905 and 5177 respectively) that year, representing an increase of 5.8% for Australia and a decrease of 0.2% for New Zealand on 2011.
