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AFC can help indicate:
How many eggs are left in your ovaries
The total number of mature eggs you might retrieve from a stimulation cycle
The chances of one stimulation cycle resulting in a healthy baby in the future
The dosage of stimulation medication a doctor will prescribe in order to facilitate the best result
What Is An Antral Follicle?
An antral follicle is a small, fluid-filled sac inside your ovary that contains an immature egg. The follicle itself plays a major role in egg maturation and the subsequent release of an egg in ovulation
What Do Follicles Tell You About Your Fertility?
Let’s dial the clock back to when you were just a baby. Back then you started out with one to two million immature follicles just sitting there dormant inside your ovaries. Once you hit puberty, that number nosedives down to around 300,000 or 400,000. By age 37, most women can expect to have about 25,000 follicles left. And when a women has around 1,000 follicles left, scientists believe that is what triggers the start of menopause.
From puberty to age 35, this translates to the loss of about 1,000 follicles per month (33 per day, on average) and the amount of follicles lost per month accelerates after age 35.
So where are those follicles going?!
Out of all of those 1,000 follicles only one has the chance of reaching ovulation. During ovulation, a mature egg is released from the follicle. The other 99% of them disintegrate back into your ovaries in a process known as atresia, which happens at various points during the maturation process. In addition to the follicles lost during your natural ovulatory cycle, there are additional outside forces like smoking that have the power to accelerate the loss of these follicles (we review all of these damaging lifestyle factors in depth in the book, Everything Egg Freezing). Because things like smoking accelerate the loss of follicles, it has the ability to accelerate aging in general, leading to cases of premature menopause.
In short, a combination of nature and nurture can will define how many follicles are left in your ovaries now (commonly referred to as your, "ovarian reserve") and how quickly they will disappear before you hit the inevitable mark of natural infertility, menopauseDoes A Low AFC Count Mean You Are Infertile?
Your ovarian reserve does not directly indicate your likelihood of getting pregnant. It's not a zero sum game. That means the AFC can't accurately predict the likelihood of you getting pregnant if you tried to, say, next month. Fertility is a numbers game to a certain extent, but all that's needed for pregnancy is one good quality egg to be ovulated - and that can happen whether you have a store of millions or only a few hundred queueing up behind by the time you get to trying.
Procedure
Antral follicle count is rightly done on day 3 of the cycle by a Trans vaginal ultrasound. Initially the ovarian volume of both the ovaries is calculated. Further the number of small antral follicles in both the ovaries is measured. These follicles could vary in size from 2-10 mm
Principle
A female is born with a lifetime supply of eggs and as she enters puberty these eggs develop. During and after puberty these follicles develop and are released on a monthly basis.
An antral follicle is a resting follicle and appears as a small fluid-filled sac which contains an immature egg. These follicles can be measured and counted on cycle days 2, 3 and 5. The antral follicles vary every month.