A woman’s fertility changes very quickly with age, the chances of pregnancy in women over 35 years of age are decreasing. Nowadays, women are educated, very ambitious and hard-working, with the result that they decide to have children very late in life. There are situations where we try to achieve pregnancy in mature women, and here somewhat a fight with biology begins. The effectiveness of the efforts for achieving pregnancy in a natural way in healthy and young women is approximately 23% per cycle, so roughly one in four women has a chance of pregnancy. If a woman is over 35 years of age, these chances drop to approximately 8% per cycle, while after the 40th year of age – even below 2%.
The AMH test is carried out just like any other blood test. From the patient’s perspective, it is very easy to do – it is enough to collect a blood sample for testing. Importantly, we can collect this blood sample at any time during the cycle. From the laboratory’s perspective, the test is carried out using the Elisa technique, which is one of the oldest methods, but also quite troublesome and difficult to perform. For this reason, tests should be carried out in the same laboratory so as to ensure their comparability. It is very hard to compare the AMH results from different laboratories, which is a standard in the case of all other hormones. AMH is used in numerous diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. On the one hand, it tells us how fertile a woman is and how many eggs we can obtain from her, while, on the other hand, based on this result we can predict for how long this fertility will be maintained. There are cases where young women lose their fertility very soon, or conversely – mature women aged over 40 still have good prognosis of getting pregnant. Moreover, on the basis of this result we can plan the stimulation of patients approaching the in vitro fertilization procedure – we can set the dose and quantity of medications in order to achieve the optimum result. On the one hand, as many egg cells as possible; on the other hand, only as many as necessary to avoid the occurrence of the ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome in a woman. The outcome informs us also when a woman will enter the menopausal age.