Maybe IUI isn’t as useless as we thought
It’s cheaper and less invasive than IVF – and for a very specific group of people, IUI might just provide the answer they needed.
Good morning!
Today I am addressing a subject I have actively dismissed on the podcast on multiple occasions: IUI. But actually, for a small group of fertility patients, there’s a chance it might be the solution to their problems.
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Have a lovely weekend! We’ll see you on Tuesday.
Emma xxx
Look, I hold my hands up: I have, historically, been pretty rude about intrauterine insemination (IUI), the process of injecting sperm directly into the uterus.
For certain people – same-sex couples with no history of infertility using donor sperm, for example, or people who struggle to make love (forgive this euphemism – there are certain spam-tastic words one simply cannot use in an email), or single women (also using donor sperm) – it’s a great idea. For anyone else, it has always seemed to me to be a little… well, pointless.
But then I thought about it. The average cost of a cycle of IUI is a fraction of that of IVF – at my clinic it’s £1,400 for an IUI cycle, compared with upwards of £4,500 for IVF. We’re living in an expensive world right now. Maybe, before I dismissed it altogether, I should have looked into IUI more. Because for a very certain group of people, it just might solve their problems and keep their savings intact.
Success factors
There isn’t a lot of data out there about how many fertility treatment cycles are IUI, but it is definitely less popular than it was, says Holly Exeter, a senior embryologist at CRGH Portland.
“For most patients, the journey to getting fertility treatment is a long one,” she says. “By the time they are choosing to come for treatment, a success rate of less than 11% does not sound worth the time it would take to finally start a family.”
Well, quite. That’s one of the reasons I was so rude about IUI: I didn’t understand the difference between it and love-making (sorry, sorry). Surely the, err, “gentleman’s appendage” functions in exactly the same way that an IUI would – by sort of shooting the sperm through the cervix, into the uterus?