Introduction: It has been shown that the presence of multinucleated blastomeres (MNB) is a predictor of low embryo implantation, poor pregnancy rate and aneuploidy.
Aim: To gain insight into the pathophysiology of ovarian aging, as defined by the Bologna criteria, by evaluating its association to MNB.
Materials: One hundred and two infertile women eligible for IVF/ICSI treatments were prospectively investigated throughout their IVF cycles. At the end of treatment 51 women with poor ovarian response were chosen as the study group. The control group included 51 women with normal ovarian response. All 416 embryos were graded before transfer in accordance with the routine embryo scoring systems and for the presence or absence of MNB.
Results: The number of women which had at least one embryo with MNB was significantly higher in the study group compared to the control; 49% vs. 31%, respectively. In addition, the average ratio of MNB embryos to total number of embryos was significantly higher in the poor ovarian response group compared to the control; 0.20 ± 0.27 vs. 0.10 ± 0.23, respectively. Moreover employing logistic regression analysis, the rate of MNB appearance was significantly and inversely dependent on the number of total embryos achieved i.e. ovarian reserve.
Conclusions: Our study reveals, for the first time, that the rate of MNB is higher in infertile low ovarian reserve women. This finding supports the notion that multinucleation is a phenomenon associated with chromosomal aneuploidy and that MNB can be used as a simple measure for grading embryos` in IVF.
