The study, published in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 932 couples where the women had no identifiable cause of infertility and the men had a sperm count considered adequate. Couples treated with the combination technique were 3.2 times as likely to become pregnant as those where only intracervical insemination was used. The combination technique also was 1.7 times more likely to result in pregnancy compared with intrauterine insemination alone.
Infertility appears to be a growing problem in the United States.
In an editorial accompanying the study, Dutch researchers question whether infertility rates really are rising or whether patients are making premature assumptions about their fertility status. Egbert R. Te Velde, MD, and Bernard J. Cohlen, MD, of University Hospital in Utrecht, the Netherlands, suggest that couples with perceived infertility may not be counseled properly on their chances of conceiving spontaneously. They also stated that a similar percentage of couples who became pregnant through a combination of intrauterine insemination and superovulation in the New York study probably would have conceived normally by waiting an additional year and having regular intercourse during that time. But a study co-author says that the average length of infertility among the couples in the study merited trying more aggressive therapy. The average duration of infertility was 43 months.