Fertility supplements to improve egg quality

We know we are born with our ovarian reserve, and the number of our "eggs" can only decrease, from the moment we are born until we completely run out of them, by the time we get to menopause. We also know the quality of our oocytes starts to decrease by the time we reach our thirties, and the chances of ovulating abnormal eggs unable to create normal embryos are higher the older we get.

But is there really nothing we can do to improve this egg quality?

Truth be told, this a very controversial subject. The efficiency of a treatment, be it a subscription med or a dietary supplement, can only be proven by studies. While medicines benefit from multiple studies, dietary supplements receive far less attention from the part of the medical community. Therefore less studies are performed and easier to say "we don't know if this supplement really improves oocyte quality, because there are not enough studies out there to confirm it". Lots of REs though, consider that even if there is not enough proof supplements help to improve your fertility, they don't hurt either, so you might as well take them, if only for your peace of mind. And that's already a great starting point, in my opinion, for having the impression of doing something, instead of just playing the wait and see game, means a lot for an infertility patient.

There are some supplements out there who are more spoken about, and who also benefit from some studying. Those are the ones I would like to tell you about*

COENZYME Q10 is one of the most important coenzymes. It is a substance made naturally in the body and it plays a critical role in the creation of cellular energy. CoQ10 is found inside the tissue of organs such as the brain, heart, liver and kidneys (which demand more energy) but  it exists in virtually all our cells and tissues. There are two main forms of this coenzyme, and this creates confusion.

Ubiquinone is the conventional form of CoQ 10. That is what we used to take before 2007, when a better form of CoQ10 was discovered, the Ubiquinol.

The problem with Ubiquinone( the basic form of CoQ10) is that your body needs to convert it into Ubiquinol before it can improve the cellular energy your organs need to function at best levels. As we age, the body struggles harder to convert the Ubiquinone in Ubiquinol, hence the recommendation to use directly the Ubiquinol form, for better results.

Ubiquinol is known to be a very strong antioxidant and its main role is to neutralise the free radicals that can harm your cells.

MYO INOSITOL- initially used in PCOS patients and for fighting insulin resistance, this nutrient has become the golden weapon in the infertility battle. It has been proven that, at a dosage of 4 g daily (most studies use this amount as reference) it has improved the ovarian function and number of oocytes retrieved in patients undergoing IVF cycles, and who have previously been considered poor responders.

The following is a link to a 2011 study aiming to evaluate the pregnancy outcome after the administration of myo-inositol combined with melatonin (will talk about it later in this article) in women who failed to conceive in previous IVF cycles, because of low egg quality. The results were crystal clear, everything was better post treatment : number of mature oocytes retrieved, fertilization rate, number of total embryos and number of top quality embryos.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21463230

Here is a more recent study (2015) showing Myo-Inositol supplementation might be beneficial for previous poor responders during IVF cycles.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464995/

And here we go again. I personally haven't found a brand to sell 4 g pills. I think that's a pity. Out of all the supplements I am taking, Myo Inositol is the one that I struggle with the most. At one point I was taking 4 one gram pills a day. And big ones too.