Infertility - Know More About Causes, Symptoms & Treatment

Hello everyone,

I am doctor Rupali and I work as an infertility specialist. Now today, I am going to be talking about the causes, symptoms and basic treatment of infertility in general. When should we start suspecting that yes this could be a patient of infertility or when should you people start expecting that yes you could be a patient of infertility? Now in general as a thumb rule, it requires usually one year of regular unprotected intercourse for us to label a patient as being infertile for us to label yes the couple is infertile.

Now what are the chances that this patient can conceive, now what are the chances usually a couple would conceive within a span of one year, say approximately around 72% of patients would conceive in 6 months time, by the time it is one year it goes after 80% and by the time it's 2 years it goes as high as over 90%. Apart from that we usually do start getting more actively investigational in patients who are say aging more so in the current scenario where we do get couples who do not want to have babies in the initial years of marriage, who are more work prone, concentrating on their work and time the age limit is around 35 years after which we are more actively into investigations. The third criteria are if we have some history which helps us to find out that yes this patient could have a problem, like a patient who gives us the history of :

1) Irregular cycles where the periods are irregular.
2) Heavy flow during periods could also mean problem.
3) Delayed periods in such patients or even no periods, no period for 3 months, no periods for 6 months.

These are the patient likely to be infertile apart from that yes history of pain lower abdomen, history of fever, history of tuberculosis, history of excessive vaginal discharge which is associated with some amount of foul smell or itching, etc. These are kind of patients where we would start suspecting that yes they could have a problem in the female partner.

Now apart from that, the male partner’s history is to be also taken in detail. We would start thinking of problems of fertility in the male partner, if the amount of ejaculate is less or if they are unable to ejaculate at the right time or there is a deformity, any form of coital problems during coitus also is a reason why would we investigating them for infertility.

Now treatment in these patients would not mean an IVF, treatment in these patients would vary according to the conditions and most of the conditions we might end up doing are minor interventions like giving them drugs, like regularising their cycles, helping them to lose weight, which is one of the most important criteria and then finally guiding them into pregnancy with the help of certain medications, small ultrasounds and they might conceive.
Yes down the line procedures like intrauterine insemination or IVF also do come towards the end, but yes initially they can be managed by simpler things.

I hope this is informative enough for you people we will continue in the next video.

Thank you