Effect of maternal age on endometrial morphology among Ghanaian infertile women

Abstract

As more women choose to delay childbearing, increasing numbers of them face age-related fertility problems. Normal endometrial receptivity is essential for the establishment of any pregnancy and its evaluation is thus considered a basic goal in the assessment of female infertility. It is unclear as to whether women who present to infertility clinics at older age have age-related endometrial retar-dation or luteal phase defect. This study was designed to investigate the prevalence of luteal phase defect (LPD) among infertile women and its relationship with age. Mid-luteal endometrial biopsies were taken from eighty (80) infertile women attending fertility clinics of Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Magazine Clinic and the Bomso Specialist Hospital in Kumasi metropolis and ten fertile women as control using dilatation and curettage and then processed for light microscopy. The re-sults show that 65.0% of the biopsies of the infertile women were normal in development hence their infertility could be due to other factors. In 35.0% of the biopsies the endometrial development was out-of-phase and therefore suggestive of a defective luteal phase which may lead to a non-receptive endometrium during the implantation window. There was no significant difference when LPD was analyzed according to age suggesting that ageing has no significant effect on endometri-al retardation from this study.

Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences (2012) 1(1), 9-13

Keywords: Luteal phase defect, Infertility, Ageing, Non-receptivity