Most of the criticism levelled at complementary therapies is based on the fact that a lot of them don’t actually do anything. Techniques such as homeopathy and reflexology do not have a clinically proven mode of action and don’t deliver any benefit beyond placebo. But at the same time, many would argue that this fact makes it perfectly acceptable for women who are desperate to conceive to use such therapies if they think they will help. After all, what’s the harm?

But women who use alternative therapies may actually be damaging their chances of successfully conceiving through fertility treatment, according to Jacky Boivin of the Cardiff University. In a study of more than 800 Danish women embarking on IVF treatment, 45% of those who also took complementary therapies got pregnant within 12 months, compared with 66% for those who didn’t. The implication is clear: complementary therapies, usually thought of as ultimately benign, can dent your chances of having a baby via IVF.

That’s pretty striking. But the results call for closer analysis. First of all, what could the mechanism be? Boivin suggested that herbal supplements (which accounted for nearly 40% of complementary therapies in the study) might interfere with the hormone-altering drugs and other medications essential for successful IVF. Or perhaps the type of person who is interested in complementary medicine is not the type who will reliably self-administer all the right injections at exactly the right time.

But what about the most popular complementary therapy among the women in the study – reflexology? How can a glorified foot rub stop you conceiving a baby? The answer might be that women who use complementary treatments are not using them to help themselves get pregnant – they’re doing it to try and cope with the psychological stress caused by their own infertility.

That leaves us with a chicken-and-egg situation. Are pregnancy rates lower because the women are using complementary therapies, or are the complementary therapies a reaction to greater stress and the need for more psychological relief? Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The best way to help these women might be to tall them to ditch the holistic massages and healing crystals, and instead turn to procedures that definitely do work, such as psychological counselling to cope with the stress and depression that can be engendered by infertility. In this way, infertile women might feel less burdened by the pressure to conceive, and in so doing, boost their chances of success.

It’s expensive, there’s no guarantee of success, and it seems that, for women of a certain age, it might just be better not to bother spending the money at all. IVF, at least using a woman’s own eggs, should have an age limit of 44, some fertility experts are now claiming.

IVF is often used to help women the wrong side of 30 to overcome their declining fertility. But data on those receiving IVF in their 40s suggests that the rate of success diminishes effectively to zero beyond the mid-40s. Doctors led by Ronit Machtinger at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center calculate that, for a sample of 154 IVF attempts carried out on women aged 45, less than 2% resulted in pregnancy, and two-thirds of pregnancies miscarried. For every successful pregnancy, almost half a million dollars had been spent by women in the sample group. Compare that with an average cost-per-pregnancy of $14,000 for women under 35.

A similar study at the University of New South Wales in Australia also concluded that 45 seems to be the cutoff point after which women should be advised not to even attempt IVF using their own eggs.

Sceptics of fertility treatment might argue that this is Mother Nature trying to tell us something. But that’s not to say that older women can’t become pregnant by IVF – it’s just that they would be advised to use somebody else’s eggs to do it. Britain’s oldest mother became pregnant after receiving IVF treatment using donated eggs, and although doctors are reluctant to treat women who may not be likely to live to see their child grow up, there is currently no legal age limit for motherhood, artificial or otherwise.

One of the dominant themes of clinical research is the issue of how to preserve the fertility of young women or girls facing cancer. At the moment, the best bet seems to be freezing eggs or ovarian tissue, as sadly the rigours of chemotherapy usually cause the ovaries to shut down completely. But a new way to protect ovaries from aggressive chemotherapy may be on the horizon, says Kate Stern of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Stern told us about a pilot study in which she gave 18 female cancer patients a drug that temporarily and partially shuts the ovaries down, hopefully protecting them from the full onslaught of chemotherapy. The drug, called cetrorelix, calms the production of hormones that fuel ovarian function. Of 18 women given the drug, all but one had resumed normal menstruation a year after their chemotherapy, and many are hopeful that they will successfully have kids in future.

Stern’s study was small and needs to be replicated in a proper clinical trial, but if it does work, the drug could offer a useful complement to egg freezing, and perhaps even supersede it entirely. After all, prevention is better than cure.

One of the time-honoured rituals of big conferences is trawling the marketing booths in the exhibition hall looking for decent handouts (ideally edible ones). This year’s top freebie takes the meeting’s human reproduction theme to a quite ridiculous extreme, in the form of ‘sperm drinks’ (Irish cream liquer, since you asked), lovingly presented in a plastic container shaped like a wiggly egg-seeking gamete. After gingerly opening one and having a taste, several female members of the press room commented that it’s not often you come to an embryology conference and find the ideal hen night accessory…

One of the pitfalls of having IVF is that you’re likely to end up with more than you bargained for – even when only one embryo is implanted, the likelihood of having identical twins runs at roughly seven times that for natural births. Through some ingenious time-lapse film-making, Dianna Payne of the Mio Fertility Clinic in Yonago, Japan, has now shown us how it happens.

She set up a microscope and video camera to document the first few hours and days of a growing test-tube embryo’s life. As these still images from the movei show, the embryo on the bottom left clearly features not one, but two ‘inner cell masses’ – the ball of cells that ultimately becomes a person. PAyne’s film showed how, in some cases, the cavity that makes up the rest of the ‘blastocoele’ sometimes collapses and reforms, occasionally transferring some cells to the opposite side of the embryo and resulting in two cell masses, which then go on to become identical twins.

Payne’s work used surplus embryos donated to research. But it has raised hopes that one day, all mothers undergoing IVF could have their embryos examined to check for this process before the embryo is transferred to the womb. Thus couples could avoid having twins… unless they really want them, of course.

The first big story of the meeting is the news that doctors can now take and freeze eggs from girls as young as five, preserving their fertility in the event that they suffer childhood cancers. The treatment offers the potential to store eggs from kids facing aggressive chemotherapy that is likely to leave them sterile in later life.

Many post-pubertal women already freeze eggs, sometimes because they have cancer, in other cases simply because they want to delay having children until later in life. But the outlook for young children diagnosed with cancer was very bleak, because it was not thought that mature eggs could be obtained from such young individuals. The only alternative – freezing the entire ovarian cortex, which contains egg-producing follicles – has a much lower success rate.

But now researchers led by Ariel Revel of Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem have shown that follicles can be obtained from the embryonic tissue of girls as young as five. When treated with the right cocktail of hormones these can be coaxed into developing into mature eggs in the test tube – these eggs can then be frozen for later use.

Reaction to the news has been mixed – even the headline of the British sunday paper story that broke the news seemed to imply some ethical reservations. But overall the reaction has been positive – after all, despite the severity of many childhood cancers, survival rates hover between 70% and 90%, and anything that gives these kids a shot at one day becoming parents must surely be welcomed.

Work with unfertilized eggs could provide a way around restrictions on embryo experiments.

Human embryonic stem-cell lines have been successfully produced without using fertilized eggs. The researchers responsible work in Italy, which has some of the most restrictive embryo-research laws in the world. They hope the work will be welcomed as an ethically acceptable source of stem cells, as it does not involve destroying a viable embryo.

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Technological advance could help infertile people to have children.

Stem cells from a mouse embryo have been coaxed into producing both eggs and sperm in the same dish. The eggs and sperm are the most mature yet grown in the lab, and the advance brings researchers closer to their ultimate aim: producing human eggs and sperm from adult body cells so that infertile men and women can have their own children.

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Successful sheep trial raises hopes for human procedure.

Womb transplants in humans should be possible within five years, say scientists in Sweden who have successfully transplanted uteruses in sheep. The procedure would allow women who have functioning ovaries but no womb to carry their own children, and the researchers say they have already been contacted by hundreds of women who are interested in having such a transplant.

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Nearly every talk I’ve attended at this conference has included at least one slide showing a smiling bouncing baby, to remind us all why ultimately we’re here, I guess.

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