CREA recommend to encourage single-embryo transfer to avoid multiple gestations.

- Contrary to the majority of European Countries, Spanish national health service allows transfer of three embryos. 

- Single-embryo transfer, according to CREA, would cut down fees and costs for the health service by reducing the extra care involved in multiple pregnancy. 

- At CREA 70 per cent of the egg donations were performed with single embryo, maintaning one of the best pregnancy rates on national scale. 

Valencia 15/09/14. One of the aim of assisted reproduction’s professionals is to avoid multiple pregnancies for those patients who do not wish them. CREA (Assisted Reproduction Medical Centre) support single-embryo Transfer, such as happens in other European Countries, since it avoids not only multiple pregnancies but also the possible extra care and assistance required for both mother and babies. 

In this sense, it should be pointed out that Spanish legislation allows to transfer up to three embryos. CREA specifies that the implementation of single-embryo transfer would entail a reduction of fees and costs for the health service by reducing the ones involved in a multiple gestation. Since more than three years CREA has implemented its Single-Embryo Transfer Program. Indeed, 70 per cent of the egg donations performed at CREA involves single-embryo transfer.

To set up this program it’s necessary to achieve high pregnancy rate by transferring only one embryo, in order not to lose effectiveness in terms of pregnancy achievement. For this it’s essential to specifically adapt the embryology lab to a selective blastocyst colture program that has also to count on an advanced embryos vitrification program. At the same time the entire Clinic must have established specific work guidelines aimed to obtain embryos with better implantation potential, which allow to transfer one embryo and at the same time to maintain high pregnancy rates. 

“Avoiding multiple pregnancy for those patients who do not wish it it’s one of our Clinic’s crucial goals. Single-embryo transfer allow to eliminate this possibility, but it forces to perform better embryos selection, “and blastocysts culture is an essential tool to achieve it” points out Doctor Miguel Ruíz Jorro, CREA’s co-director. 

In this sense he specifies that blastocyst culture, in order to offer good results and safety, entails a series of global changes, not only in the incubators that must be specifics for this type of culture, but also in the global functioning of the embryology lab, “and really in the whole clinic’s program as it already happened at CREA”, points out Doctor Ruiz Jorro who also indicates the embryos genetic diagnosis as one of the techniques to achieve succes in single-embryo transfer. 

Blastocyst is the name an embryo receives in its most advanced phase of development (normally after the fifth day) and is characterized for presenting a clearly defined structure. It is now possible to differentiate between the population of cells; those that will constitute the embryo itself and those that, on the contrary, will become the placenta and other extra-embryonic membranes.