Empty Follicle Syndrome

The empty follicle, or not getting any eggs on an egg collection is one of the most distressing things that tends to happen.  Does empty follicle syndrome occur, the answer is yes.

There are three types of empty follicle syndrome;

• those in which there are no eggs in the follicles, which occurs in women with low AMH, and older women
• those where there is a failure to obtain eggs even after there is a good follicular development and adequate trigger which is HCG given
• those in which there is a very low amount of HCG trigger which causes faults

In a case presented in Human Reproduction they evaluated a woman who underwent nine cycles of IVF with HCG trigger. In the eighth cycle there were no eggs, in the ninth cycle an analogue trigger was given 40 hours before and a double trigger was done, and 16 eggs were obtained after eight cycles of IVF, thus signifying that sometimes changing the trigger significantly changes the outcome of pregnancy.