How Long Does It Take To Get Pregnant? What is Normal When You Are Trying to Conceive?

how long is it going to take you to get [Music] pregnant hi friends I'm Dr Natalie Crawford I am a fertility expert I'm a fertility doctor board certified in OBGYN and REI and today I want to talk about how long is it going to take you to get pregnant so resolve recently pulled did a study of a thousand women who are trying to get pregnant and some of the results are potentially startling to the general public so so you can see that Yahoo even published nearly 60% of women say they wish they knew how long it would take to get pregnant before they started trying and that's not news to me but that might be news to you so how long does it really take you to get pregnant and what are the odds one thing that was done in this study or this survey that I think is just interesting is one of the questions they asked was did you think about your ability to get pregnant before you had a baby and 77% so they didn't even think about what it would be like what they would need to do that they might have infertility until they started trying to get pregnant 77% and this is one of my big passions and why this channel exists to help educate you about your body because for so many people having a baby is a life goal and when would you approach a life goal without any plan and not even thinking about it but that's the truth when it comes to pregnancy and Family Planning right now we spend half your reproductive years trying not to get pregnant preventing pregnancy using contraception and then suddenly you decide I want to be pregnant and it's now what pull the goalie and hope see what happens and very often we don't have the actual data we need when it comes to trying to get pregnant so 60% of women said They wish they knew how long it would have taken them and 70% said they were worried about their probability of getting pregnant and that this feeling intensified as more time went on which poses the question how long is too long and what is normal so let's talk about some basic stats when we talk about getting pregnant we're going to talk about something called fundability and this means the chance of pregnancy per month this is one of the most finite data points we can use to evaluate getting pregnant so when we start thinking about it what I want you to think about is that we know the chance of getting pregnant per month drops as we get older it's not because you're going to be out of X even though event eventually you do run out of eggs it's more because the quality of the egg that's why age is such a strong determinant you know my favorite analogy if you've been around I like to think about your ovary imagine you have a vault inside that has all of your eggs every single month you have a group of eggs that you're losing From the Vault and from the group one is chosen to ovulate the rest die this is why you can be born with one to two million eggs only ovulate about 400 over the course of your lifetime and yet still go into menopause by age 50 or so you lose more eggs than you're ever going to ovulate but the rate limiting stuff as you get older is that those eggs have been sitting inside that Vault your entire life they've been absorbing the wear and tear of your life the inflammation the toxins and that's even if you're living a clean life it's just true but the more you know the more you can do earlier and the better game plan you have the better off you're going to be the analogy I always use for eggs is that your chromosomes are lined up in their perfect spot but what happens is over time they just get out of line imagine a line of kindergarteners and I ask them to stand there for 42 years they're going to get out of line This is why the odds of finding a genetically normal egg decrease dramatically as we age 35 is that magic number that most people have you know Advanced maternal age geriatric pregnancy but that's just because at that moment you're now at a position where about half your eggs are genetically normal and half are not so understanding that is helpful it doesn't mean you can't get pregnant at 35 but if you're not starting your family till then and then especially if you want to have more than one child you might need to understand some of these numbers so if you are 25 years old your chance of getting pregnant per month is 25% this is the highest it's ever going to be not 125 when you're 30 it's now going to be 20% per month at 35 it's going to drop to be about 15% per month at 40 it's now going to be less than 5% per month so that's a pretty big drop especially once you go from that 35 to 40 so you can feel that it becomes more dramatic after that time if you look at the same data different way you can say what's the chance I'm not going to be pregnant at a year of trying because if you think about that at 20% chance per month if you're 30 you should be pregnant within 12 months of trying but in reality if you are in the age group of under 30 then you have a really high chance of getting pregnant with in a year so that typically is going to be around 80% so that's the majority of people in the under 30 age group when you advance that to 30 to 34 now the number is 63% so we have a bigger chunk of people who were not pregnant within a year of trying and when we look at the 35 to 39 group now it's 50% of people so the adage if you are 31 and somebody says well you're just young keep trying that may not be the appropriate answer because 40% % of people are not going to be pregnant after a year this data has structured the definition of infertility it's important to remember that one infertility is a disease two there's more to your reproductive Health than just the ability to get pregnant but your fertility is a state of your well-being meaning sometimes having infertility or pregnancy loss is an actual sign that there might be something else going on in addition to this the screening tests all screening tests that we do they're all BAS based on the probability of finding somebody with the disease so versus doing a workout for everybody before they start trying to get pregnant you make somebody get into a category where there's a higher probability of finding something wrong we can argue about that it's not my favorite approach but it is what the definition of a screening test means that's why you don't get a colonoscopy when you're 30 unless you're in a high-risk group you don't get a mamogram until you're 40 unless you're in a high-risk group you don't get the screening done until you're in a category that means you have a higher risk of something being wrong so to have infertility to get the test for infertility the official definition is trying to get pregnant for a year and not having success if you're under age 35 or for six months if you're over age 35 and this is just stratifying the odds of trying to say this person might need more intervention or have something going on certainly that presumes your periods are regular normal predictable you're ovulating you're not in terrible excruciating pain you don't carry a known diagnosis of endometriosis or PCOS asherman syndrome a uterine birth effect something abnormal that you know about that presumes that your partner is able to ejaculate complete the ACT if you're having difficulty with intercourse then you're not really being able to try in the same way similarly if you and your partner are in different places and you're not able to have intercourse in the fertile window so those are all signs that you should get an evaluation sooner because you deserve to know what's going on with your body the number one thing that I see is somebody's having no or irregular periods yet they waited an amount of time before coming in when their body was already telling us that something was wrong last important fact from this article this survey was that 60% of women said They wish they knew how emotionally difficult this would be and 33% a third of people said they felt very alone this is where sharing your story and supporting your friends talking to the people in your world about what's going on asking questions to let others know that you're supporting them and talking about our experience I love hearing conversations that people are talking about this at brunch or dinner or with their friends because the discussion is the turning point for potentially making a choice that could change your life and if you want to have children then we need to understand what the game plan is to help you have the highest odds of achieving that goal I do have some videos that you can watch if you want to learn a little bit more about when you first start trying to get pregnant or timing ovulation so feel free to check those out and then ask me any questions that you have about fundability getting pregnant what you should know beforehand and would love to do more videos on those soon as always you can get more information on the as awom podcast or follow along on Instagram at Natalie coford MZ thanks friends [Music]

Channel: Natalie Crawford, MD

Views: 14,312

Keywords: fertility, infertility, natalie crawford md, dr natalie crawford, as a woman podcast

Id: YBB7CfTlyq4

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024