With this research, the professionals at IVF-Life aimed to delve deeper into the factors that contribute to the occurrence of aneuploidies, as well as the impact that Body Mass Index (BMI) has on fertility and reproductive medicine processes.
Thus, the latest scientific study conducted at our centers focused on clarifying whether there is any relationship between these two concepts.
BMI is an indicator used to assess whether a person is at a normal weight or if they have a weight that is below or above what is considered healthy by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is defined as a BMI range between 18.50 and 24.99.
To calculate BMI, it is necessary to establish a relationship between an individual’s weight and height by applying the following formula: BMI = Weight (kg) / Height² (m²). Not having an ideal weight can negatively impact fertility, as well as the prognosis of the recommended assisted reproduction treatments.
While the implications of BMI in this context have been studied over the years, clarifying, for example, its relationship with the decreased rate of oocytes retrieved or the significant increase in days of ovarian stimulation, to date, the scientific literature does not contain a substantial number of texts discussing the potential relationship between BMI and the aneuploidies that an embryo may present.
When discussing embryonic aneuploidies, we refer to alterations that can occur in the chromosomal content of embryos, which can be detected using a technique called Preimplantation Genetic Testing for aneuploidies (PGT-A).
This procedure is based on the analysis of a biopsy from a blastocyst-stage embryo, specifically from the cells of the trophectoderm, which will later form the placenta.
The research sample included 889 embryos from in vitro fertilization cycles with own eggs that had been analyzed using the aforementioned diagnostic techniques. They were grouped into different categories based on two factors: the patients’ Body Mass Indexes and their ages. Age was considered a subject of study because the older a woman is, the higher the probability of chromosomal abnormalities in her embryos.
Our retrospective study found no significant differences in the general group concerning the percentage of aneuploid embryos. The same occurred in the age segmentation, where the patients’ data in most groups did not show a noticeable disparity.
However, the final conclusions of the research indicate that despite no significant peaks in the mentioned groups, there is a notable increase in the aneuploidy rate in women under 35 and over 39 with a BMI lower than 22.1 – something that does not occur in the groups between 35 and 38 years old.
According to Rebeca Fernández and María Velasco, Co-Directors and Biologists at the IVF-Life Donostia Laboratory, these findings encourage further investigation into the reproductive prognosis of women with lower weight whose gametes, upon fertilization, resulted in aneuploid embryos in their treatments and, more generally, continue exploring the overall relationship between BMI and chromosomal abnormalities.