I was wondering if you’ve ever heard anything about HCG and any potential negative effects on a woman’s ovarian reserve level.
I have to be honest I had to look this one up! For those who are curious what this is, ovarian reserve level is just a fancy term for a woman’s egg count. Apparently, there is testing for this! And of course, this certainly of great concern for any woman who really wants to have children, given the increasing struggles with infertility going on these days.
I guess there are two factors – egg count and egg quality.
Interestingly a study was done in women 30-44 years of age that showed that egg count (having less or more) didn’t actually really seem to have any statistical effect on their ability to get pregnant. That doesn’t answer the question of course but I just thought it was interesting!
The first article I mentioned quoted one doctor as saying, “the decline in natural fertility with age is actually driven primarily by egg quality.” I guess there is no way to test egg quality before fertilization.
As you may know, hCG is actually used as a fertility treatment – and perhaps your concern is will taking hCG injections on the diet perhaps “waste” eggs in a sense by causing more ovulation when you are not ready to get pregnant? I’m not sure if this is the real question, I’m just guessing as I go down this thought path.
So in researching how hCG is used for fertility treatments, a few important factors come into play that makes it seem like it would be different than how hCG behaves for us on the diet.
Fertility treatments with hCG: use single high dose shots of like 5,000iu or 10,000iu – these are called trigger injections.
There is also something called low-dose hCG treatment but it said these are not a replacement for trigger shots.
One study I found described mature women having significantly more fertilized eggs (fertilized in IVF way) with a treatment that began with a 10,000iu hCG trigger shot, and then a low-dose of hCG 200iu along WITH FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) for a period of time. This seems a lot different than simply taking low-doses of hCG by itself to me, but at least you have that to consider.
In most of what I’m reading it appears that there is always a super high trigger shot of hCG like this before these other treatments with hCG and other fertility hormones.
I also couldn’t really find anything stating that low doses of hCG by itself would cause ovulation – the use of this was always in conjunction with other trigger shots or other fertility treatments to first stimulate ovulation and then the low doses of hCG were just used to help support the maintaining of that fertilized egg.
I don’t know the actual answer, but it seems unlikely that the small dosages we take of hCG – 125-200iu per day typically, by itself without other fertility treatments, would not cause additional ovulating.
Remember I’m not a doc nor expert and I just researched this stuff on google! I hope that helps you do your own additional research!
