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199th & 200th IN VITRO FERTILIZATION BABIES BORN AT U.VA.

For Margaret and Peter Beling of Charlottesville, this Christmas promises to be especially joyful. Their six-month old twins, Andrew and Elizabeth, are the 199th and 200th babies born through the University of Virginia Health System's in vitro fertilization (IVF) program.

IVF is a laboratory procedure in which eggs are taken from the mother and combined in a special laboratory dish with sperm cells from the father to form embryos. The embryos that result then are transferred into the mother's uterus or womb.

According to Dr. Bruce Bateman, director of the U.Va. Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, recent changes in the procedure have improved the rate of pregnancies at the U.Va. clinic: for women under 40, the pregnancy rate per procedure is 40 percent as compared to the national average of 24 percent; for women over 40, the success rate is 24 percent as compared to the national average of 10 percent.

Bateman attributes U.Va.'s higher pregnancy rate to improvements in the jelly-like medium the embryos are placed in, and in the cathether used to transfer the embryo to the uterus.

IVF is used mainly for women with damaged or blocked fallopian tubes. For other types of infertility, U.Va. offers an array of treatments, including intra cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a procedure for men with extremely low sperm count. With ICSI, a single sperm is injected into the egg to achieve fertilization. The pregnancy rate is 40 percent.

December 20, 1999