As we learned previously, a woman has her peak number of eggs oocytes before she is born. Literally, tens of thousands of eggs are lost every year of her life!
As the eggs are being lost, the ovaries become smaller. Using transvaginal ultrasound, the volume of each ovary can be calculated by measuring the length, width and depth. Her reproductive age may be older or younger than her actual age. For example, a 35 year old woman with very small ovaries may have the reproductive age of a 40 year old.
Alternatively, a 40 year old with very large ovaries, may have the reproductive age of a 35 year old. The graph to the right is from a recent article in the medical journal Human Reproduction. Each line represents women of a different age group.
In the example above, we used a woman who was 35 years old line C. If her ovarian volume was 6 mL read off the vertical axis , her reproductive age would be expected to be that of a 35 year old read of the horizontal axis.
Women with small ovaries tend to respond more poorly to fertility medications than women with larger ovaries. A recent study has also suggested that you can predict how many years it will be before a woman reaches menopause by her ovarian volume. Ultrasound can also be used in other ways to determine ovarian reserve. Click here to learn more about determination of the antral follicle count or return to the ovarian reserve testing or clomid challenge test pages.
See in Google Maps. Skip to content. Ovarian volume Assessment As we learned previously, a woman has her peak number of eggs oocytes before she is born. Randy Morris M. Kelsey and W. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Article of the Year Award: Outstanding research contributions of , as selected by our Chief Editors. Read the winning articles. Journal overview. Special Issues. Kelsey 1 and W. Academic Editor: Neeta Singh. Received 05 Aug Revised 13 Nov Accepted 20 Nov Published 12 Feb Abstract A reliable indirect measure of ovarian reserve for the individual woman remains a challenge for reproductive specialists.
Introduction The human ovary contains a fixed pool of nongrowing follicles NGFs maximal at 18—22 weeks gestation that declines towards menopause when fewer than one thousand NGFs are present [ 1 ]. Materials and Methods Summary statistics were extracted from the Pavlik et al. Results The curve fitting results are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Figure 1. A normative model for the decline in human ovarian volumes from age The centre line is the mean expected value for a given age.
Figure 2. A strong and positive correlation, , between log-unadjusted mean ovarian volumes and mean NGF populations given by the Wallace-Kelsey model [ 1 ]. Figure 3. Extremely strong and positive correlations, for each pair of lines, between log-adjusted ovarian volumes and the Wallace-Kelsey model of NGF population [ 1 ]. An NGF population of 1, i. References W. Wallace and T. View at: Google Scholar P. Boersma, J. Dubas, E. Te Velde, and M. Broekmans, J. Kwee, D. Hendriks, B. Mol, and C. Kunt, G.
Ozaksit, R. Kurt et al. Sighinolfi, D. Radi et al. Mol, L. Bancsi, E. Te Velde, and F. Syrop, A. Willhoite, and B. View at: Google Scholar A. Lass, R. Silye, D. Abrams et al. View at: Google Scholar S. Ivarsson, K. Nilsson, and P. View at: Google Scholar J. Lass and P. Granberg and M. Mean ovarian volume according to age was calculated for each decade of life. Results: Data were obtained from 58, observations of ovarian volume.
Mean ovarian volume was 6.
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