114: Unpacking the concerns with conceiving late with PCOS

The PCOS Nutritionist Podcast

When you first find out you have PCOS, one of the first things you usually hear is “you’re likely going to struggle to conceive”. This is obviously extremely disconcerting — especially given that most of us are or have been diagnosed in our teens or twenties, when children are not even on our radar.

The dynamic of our lifestyles now are so different from how they’ve been historically, the considerations we as women (and as couples) have to weigh up are really complex. The combination of this and the pressure to try to conceive from doctors because of our PCOS (even when some of us aren’t even wanting children) causes a lot of distress.

One of the biggest concerns I hear off the back of this theme is that many people with PCOS are worried about their ability to conceive later, further into their thirties and beyond — which of course I resonate with as I’ve had my first at age 36. It’s funny, in maternal terms I’m actually considered a “geriatric mother” 😂

Because we’re told we’ll struggle to conceive, I think a lot of us who do want children feel like we ‘don’t have the time’ and we need to get to it or we never will have a family. Research actually is starting to suggest that the opposite might be true.

Because I so often get these questions from women and especially given I’ve been through this personally, in this podcast I’ll be unpacking conceiving with PCOS in relation to age and talking about the concerns of conceiving late.

This episode is for you if:

• You’ve been told that you’ll have trouble conceiving due to your PCOS
• You have considered freezing your eggs
• You think you might do IVF or IUI
• You’ve been told that your AMH is low
• As someone in her thirties or forties, you want to know if there’s still a possibility of you being able to conceive

Some things we cover in this episode:

• The complexities and considerations of deciding to have children in our generation compared to those of the past
• Is fertility extended in PCOS?
• Egg freezing
• Testing and how accurate it is
• We may not actually be born with all the egg we’ll ever have:
• Egg freezing in relation in IVF

Resources and References:

• My Book: Getting Pregnant with PCOS
• Fertility MoT tests 'a waste of money'
• Association Between Biomarkers of Ovarian Reserve and Infertility Among Older Women of Reproductive Age
• Anti-Müllerian Hormone and Ovarian Reserve: Update on Assessing Ovarian Function
• Egg-freezing: What's the success rate?
• Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

Links to our programs:

• The PCOS Protocol
• Eggducated