ny husband has a vericocele. we were told that either surgeryor IVF would be our best way of conceiving. does anyone know the success rate of IVF with a vericocele. our sperm issues are really bad....mostly with the morphology. just wondering if i have any hope here.
thanks
kristina
I am going through the same thing with a varicocele and bad morphology.
My doctor tried the same thing, telling us that we should just consider IUI, but there are other options to try first. First of all, was the doctor you saw about the varicocele a urologist? If not, try to find a urologist who has some experience with varicocele repair.
There are several ways to repair a varicocele. There is surgery (done by a urologist) and there is a procedure called varicocele embolization (done by an interventional radiologist).
Surgery involves a small incision in the lower abdomen. There are several ways to do the surgery, but the best way is the microsurgical subinguinal approach. During this procedure the urologist uses a microscope to better see the veins and make sure they preserve the artery and lymph nodes. This is by far the best form of the surgery.
Go on Yahoo or something and type in varicocelectomy (the official name for surgical repair of a varicocele) and you can read about the different types of surgery.
The 2nd option for varicocele repair is varicocele embolization. For this the interventional radiologist puts an IV in the right leg or side of the neck and guides a long catheter through the veins and embolizes (stops the blood flow) the veins from the inside. This has the same effect as clipping the veins during surgery. The veins are embolized using metal coils, balloons, a glue like substance or sclerosing agents (which harden the vein and cause blood flow to stop). The embolization procedure definitely is less painful, because you only have small nick in the skin compared to a several centimeter incision for surgery. Embolization has proven to be just as effective as surgery for correcting sperm abnormalities. You can check out more about the embolization procedure at www.varicoceles.com
I am in the medical field and have just gone through all of this myself. I had surgery in July of this year and hada recurrence of the varicocele several months later. Now I am going to have the embolization done to try to correct the recurrence.
Good luck and please let me know if you have another questions I can help with.
Hi stacey, thanks for your reply
gosh i'm sorry to hear you are going through the same thing.
ina way it's comforting to be finding out this problem isn't so rare.
we just completed our 3rd failed IUI. i see a specialist, an RE. and my husband sees a urologist. the uro said that the embolization wouldn't work for my husband and he'd need the surgery. it's such a huge thing, and sounds like such a brutal surgery, my husband said he would do it for us if that were our only choice.
then my RE told us that IVF could still work. and so we are trying to consider doing this before attempting a surgery. see my husband claims he feels no discomfort from the vericocele, which is odd since the uro said it is very large.
i guess i was just trying to see if anyone had known whether or not IVF would still work. i want to take my RE's word for it but he's also the one who told us IUI would work and it hasn't.
thanks again!
Kristina
My husband had low sperm count and motility. He did not have pain with his varicocele. He did have a varicocele repair which helped his numbers some but not alot. I also had issues of my own. We did end up going through IVF and the ICSI procedure and that is what worked for us. If you are in a position to try IVF I would. They will be able to find out alot during this process. They will be able to see if you eggs can be fertilized. Good luck.
My husband had a varicocele repair done about a year and ahalf ago on the advice of my gyn and a urologist. Well, the counts weren't horrible to begin with so when we finally decided to seek help from a reproductive endocronologist, he gave us the impression that he wouldn't have recommended the surgery because it did only improve his count slightly if anything. We have done 4 IUI's so far and will be doing a fifth before moving to IVF, but I think, like the previous poster said, if you are in the position to do IVF, I would go for it. I wouldn't waste time with surgery, then you have to wait to see if it even helped enough to make a difference, and then you will probably have to try for a while or do IUI's, and who knows, you may end up with IVF anyways. I don't mean to sound negative, because I realize there are couples who do have success after varicocele repair and maybe you will be one of them. However, personally, if we could do it over again, we would have just gone straight to the RE and started with the treatment cycles. One other thing I would recommend is that you have thorough testing done on you as well. Sometimes when you're having trouble conceiving they will perform the easiest tests first such as a semen analysis and if they find something wrong there, they assume that's the problem and they stop researching other possible issues. That's what my gyn and the urologist did. Turns out the sperm problem was just a tiny problem, may not have had anything to do with our problem. The RE found that I had a huge fibroid inside the uterus which was making pregnancy impossible the whole time. That had to come out before moving forward. So just make sure you cover all your bases.
Good luck!
Stacy
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