Fertility Testing Is Big Business—But Is It Really Helping You Get Pregnant?
By Elissa Strauss, Glamour Magazine [cites CGS' Fellow Gina Maranto] | 12. 28. 2017
New evidence shows that the tests many companies use to determine a woman's chances of having a baby are based on bogus science.
"Learn how many high quality eggs you have remaining and your chances of getting pregnant now and in the future,” beckons Egg-Q, one of the handful of new startups offering fertility testing to women concerned about their reproductive potential. The desire to know “how long you have left to conceive,” as offered by LetsGetChecked, or, more simply, “powerful information about your fertility,” courtesy of Modern Fertility, is understandable. Women are having children later than ever, a shift that has proved professionally and personally beneficial, but reproductively challenging. When offered a fertility magic eight ball, many can’t help but take a peek, hoping to discover something, anything, about their baby-making future.
If only that was possible.
These fertility blood tests provide women with an assortment of figures and graphs charting their ovarian reserve, along with a few other measures that will present themselves as authoritative, fate-determining even. But in reality, they offer little more than...
Related Articles
The direct-to-consumer (DTC) gene testing company 23andMe seems to be in a strange position. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is gradually loosening the legal limits it placed on the company’s operation, and the industry as a whole does seem still to be growing.
However, 23andMe, along with other direct-to-consumer gene testing companies, faces at least two other problems: increasing criticism of the value of their tests; and the rapid approach of whole-genome testing, which could make their...
In May 2017, Nature Methods published a short, peer-reviewed letter reporting on a study of off-target mutations caused by CRISPR gene-editing in mice. You might recall the (somewhat panicky) headlines along the lines of Gizmodo’s “Crispr May Not Be Nearly as Precise as We Thought,” and the swift drop in CRISPR-related stock prices. There was also immediate pushback from scientists, some with clear financial interests in recuperating CRISPR’s image, who criticized the study’s small sample size,...
By Megan Molteni, Wired | 04.02.2018
By Text: Sharon Begley Video: Retro Report, STAT | 04.02.2018
Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And those who do not remember the sometimes irrational exuberance around past advances in biomedicine may be doomed to buy into the hype around today’s. From curing Alzheimer’s...
