Fakenham couple’s twins are first babies born after pioneering IVF treatment at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn

A bouncing pair of twins are the first babies born after specialist IVF treatment at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.Taylor and Freddie Axton are now just over three months old and doing well.

Their parents Teresa and Mark Axton, who live in Fakenham, knew they would need IVF treatment if they were to have children.

Mr Axton, 42, who works as an engineering surveyor, said: “After a while Terry said to me ‘Have you ever thought about having children.

“Although I’d been married before it just hadn’t happened. The subject was dropped for a while but when we discussed it again Terry said that it would have to be by IVF, so I said ‘OK’

“Terry was referred by her GP at Burnham Market to the fertility service at Bart’s Hospital. But when their clinic in Norwich closed Terry was referred back to her GP.

“At that time the Lynn Fertility Centre was expanding so we opted for treatment in King’s Lynn. The IVF service was fantastic and everyone was brilliant.”

Mrs Axton, 40, had two sons from a previous relationship, one who is now 22 and the younger, aged 17, who was born following IVF treatment.

To qualify for NHS fertility treatment the couple had to meet specific criteria. Once accepted for treatment, Mrs Axton underwent a course of daily hormone injections during which she had ultrasound scan checks on the development of the egg follicles. When these had matured, her eggs were collected at the Arthur Levin’s Day Surgery unit in King’s Lynn.

Mr Axton then drove the eggs from the QEH to Bourn Hall Clinic, in Cambridgeshire, in an incubator plugged into the car cigarette lighter.

“It was pretty nerve-racking. I probably drove a little faster than I should have done,” he said. “Anyway, my part in the proceedings was minor compared to Terry’s achievement.”

Four days later, on February 17, Mrs Axton visited Bourn Hall for the embryos to be implanted, and her follow-up care was carried out by Lynn Fertility Centre at the QEH.

At 12 weeks she learned that she was expecting a boy and a girl. Both were born on October 20, Taylor weighed 4lb 12oz and Freddie weighed 4lb 1oz.

Mrs Axton said: “The staff from Lynn Fertility Centre and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital really were excellent.

“Nothing was too much trouble for them. If we needed help, advice or reassurance at any time of the day or night, someone was always there for us, and we’ll never forget that.”

Hamed Al-Taher, lead consultant at the Lynn Fertility Centre, said the twins’ arrival was a positive landmark for the new IVF service and its partnership with the Bourn Hall Clinic.

“Transport IVF means more patients’ choice and less need to travel for couples receiving IVF without compromising the success of the treatment,” he said.

Chromosome counting technique gives IVF a boost

One cycle of IVF, one egg, one embryo and one baby.

It sounds simple, and yet for the 35,000 women who undergo IVF in the UK each year it's unlikely.

Only one in three IVF cycles is successful, each one costing potentially thousands of pounds.

But a new chromosome counting technique pioneered at Oxford University could put paid to all that.

Microarray CGH (comparative genomic hybridisation) is used to check for any significant abnormalities present in the chromosomes of the embryo before implantation in IVF treatment.

A small number of cells are removed from the growing embryo five days after fertilisation and the DNA in them is scanned for any clear problems.

By Philippa Roxby


The results are available within 24 hours, which allows the maximum information to be obtained from the embryo before it is used.

Armed with this knowledge, doctors can then ensure that only embryos with the correct number of chromosomes are transferred in IVF, thereby improving the chances of a successful pregnancy and reducing the likelihood of miscarriage or Down's syndrome.

Dr Dagan Wells developed the technique of applying microarray CGH to embryos at the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Oxford.

He says: "Five days after the egg is fertilised it has more than 100 cells so we can safely take some cells for testing. The tests have worked really well, giving an accuracy rating of 98% - and there is no impact on the embryo of taking these cells either."

The chromosome screening technique is not intended to look for any specific genetic disorders relevant to the couple being treated or anything more subtle than viability.


We think it will help slightly older women who have an increased risk of a Down's syndrome baby and also young women who have a repeated failure of implantation”

"We are only testing for ability to be alive," says Dr Wells.

This gets around the two problems of IVF - the number of faulty embryos produced in a typical IVF cycle and the problem of distinguishing between the faulty and healthy embryos using traditional checks.

Embryos can seem to be growing well under a microscope but may still have chromosome abnormalities, and it's these abnormalities which lead to miscarriage or a Down's syndrome baby at full term.

The CGH technique can also be used at an earlier stage on patients' eggs, rather than on the embryos - created when the sperm has fertilised the egg.

This is particularly advantageous for women who have fewer, good embryos to start with because they will not have to wait until the blastocyst stage - five days after fertilisation - for the embryos to be analysed and transferred.

In some IVF patients - particularly those above the age of 42 - it can become more and more difficult to find 'normal' embryos, because fewer eggs and fewer embryos are produced as women age.

Studies analysing the benefits of CGH to date are promising, but experts agree that more scientific evidence is required before the technique is applied routinely in IVF clinics.

A study of American women in Colorado found that pregnancy rates increased by more than 50% following chromosome screening, but since it is normal to transfer around three embryos during IVF in the US rather than just one in the UK, this enhances the results.

For Dr Wells, it is the implantation rate that is important - the chance that one embryo can make a pregnancy.

Stewart Lavery, consultant gynaecologist and director of the IVF at Hammersmith Hospital in London, has been carrying out CGH for a year.

"It's a really exciting technique which does have potential, but we have to be cautious. We need some good evidence first," he says.

The safety of the technique is certainly not in question. What IVF experts need is evidence of which patients will benefit from CGH and by how much.

Mr Lavery says: "We think it will help slightly older women who have an increased risk of a Down's syndrome baby and also young women who have a repeated failure of implantation."

So it may yet be a long time before it's available on the NHS. But it could make financial sense if it saved on costly IVF cycles, avoided terminations and cut the numbers of miscarriages dealt with in hospital.

What is certain is that in the search for a 'normal' egg and a 'normal' embryo IVF doctors have to use their judgement. Is there such a thing as a 'normal' embryo?

Even for women not going through IVF, becoming pregnant is a very tricky and complicated business. Failure to conceive is common, occurring regularly even before the woman is aware of it.

"We have already beaten the odds just by being alive," says Dr Wells.

For women going through IVF, anything that increases the odds of a baby is all that matters.

For Cold Virus, Zinc May Edge Out Even Chicken Soup

Scientists still haven’t discovered a cure for the common cold, but researchers now say zinc may be the next best thing.

A sweeping new review of the medical research on zinc shows that sniffing,sneezing, coughing and stuffy-headed cold sufferers finally have a better option than just tissue and chicken soup. When taken within 24 hours of the first runny nose or sore throat, zinc lozenges, tablets or syrups can cut coldsshort by an average of a day or more and sharply reduce the severity of symptoms, according to the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, a respected medical clearinghouse.

In some of the cited studies, the benefits of zinc were significant. A March 2008 report in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, for example, found that zinc lozenges cut the duration of colds to four days from seven days, and reduced coughing to two days from five.

While the findings are certain to send droves of miserable cold sufferers to the drugstore in search of zinc treatments, the study authors offered no guidance on what type of zinc product to buy. The authors declined to make recommendations about the optimal dose, formulation or duration of zinc use, saying that more work was needed before they could make recommendations.

“Over all, it appears that zinc does have an effect in controlling the common cold,” said Dr. Meenu Singh, the review’s lead author and a professor in the department of pediatrics at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. “But there still needs to be consensus about the dose.”

Zinc experts say that many over-the-counter zinc products may not be as effective as those studied by researchers because commercial lozenges and syrups often are made with different formulations of zinc and various flavors and binders that can alter the effectiveness of the treatment.

“A lot of preparations have added so many things that they aren’t releasing zinc properly,” said Dr. Ananda Prasad, professor in the department of oncology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and an early pioneer of research into zinc as an essential mineral. Two of Dr. Prasad’s studies were included in the Cochrane report.

“The public is confused because people have used the wrong dose, they have used the wrong sort of zinc or they have not started the treatment within 24 hours of onset,” he said.

Even so, the new report gives credence to the long-debated theory that zinc can be an effective treatment for colds. While it’s not certain how the mineral curbs colds, it appears to have antiviral properties that prevent the cold virus from replicating or attaching to nasal membranes.

The first study to show that zinc might be a useful treatment for the common cold was published in 1984, but the research was criticized for its poor methods. Since that study, 18 more trials of zinc for colds have been conducted: 11 of them showed it to be a useful treatment, while seven of them showed no benefit, according to the review.

Although a majority of trials have shown some benefit from zinc, many of them have been criticized for failing to “mask” the treatment, meaning the participants most likely knew they were using zinc, which may have skewed the results. At the same time, many of the trials that showed no benefit from zinc have been criticized for using formulations that may have contained ingredients that blunted the effectiveness of zinc.

The Cochrane reviewers selected 15 studies that enrolled a combined 1,360 participants. The studies were all considered to have good methodological quality with a low risk of bias, but they were far from perfect. All the studies compared zinc use with a placebo, but in several studies the zinc users complained about the taste of lozenges, suggesting that some people may have known that they were using zinc rather than a placebo.

Even so, when the data was pooled, the effect shown was strong. The review found that not only did zinc reduce the duration and severity of common cold symptoms, but regular zinc use also worked to prevent colds, leading to fewer school absences and less antibiotic use in children. People who used zinc were also far less likely to have a cold that lasted more than seven days.

The studies used various forms and doses of zinc, including zinc gluconate or zinc acetate lozenges and zinc sulfate syrup, and the dose ranged from 30 to 160 milligrams a day. Several studies in the Cochrane review used zinc acetate lozenges from the Web site ColdCure.com, created by George Eby, the researcher who wrote the first zinc study in 1984.

Dr. Prasad said his studies have used zinc acetate lozenges from ColdCure.com that contained about 13 milligrams of zinc. Study participants took a lozenge every three to four hours during the day for four consecutive days, resulting in a daily dose of 50 to 65 milligrams a day, he said.

Some cold sufferers have been wary about using zinc since the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers to stop using Zicam nasal sprays and swabs, which contain zinc, after numerous reports that some users lost their sense of smell after using the product. The Cochrane report did not review any studies of nasal zinc products.

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Uterine Health More Important Than Egg Quality

For women seeking pregnancy by assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a new study shows that the health of the uterus is more relevant than egg quality for a newborn to achieve normal birth weight and full gestation. This study, published in Fertility and Sterility, an international journal for obstetricians, offers new information for women with infertility diagnoses considering options for conceiving.

The study was conducted by Dr. William Gibbons, director of The Family Fertility Program at Texas Children's Hospital and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, along with colleagues at the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART) Marcelle Cedars, MD and Roberta Ness, MD. They reviewed three years of data that compared average birth weight and gestational time for single births born as a result of standard IVF, IVF with donor eggs and IVF with a surrogate. While the ability to achieve a pregnancy is tied to egg/embryo quality, the obstetrical outcomes of birth weight and length of pregnancy are more significantly tied to the uterine environment that is affected by the reason the woman is infertile.

There were more than 300,000 IVF cycles during the time of the study producing more than 70,000 singleton pregnancies.

"This is the first time that a study demonstrated that the health of a women's uterus is a key determinant for a fetus to obtain normal birth weight and normal length of gestation," said Dr. Gibbons. "While obvious issues of uterine fibroids or conditions that alter the shape of the uterus are suspected to affect pregnancy rates, conditions that result in poorer ovarian function to the point of needing donor eggs are not known. Further research is needed to fully understand this complex issue."

As assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in the U.S. mature, increasing attention is directed not just to pregnancy rates but also to the obstetrical outcomes of those resulting pregnancies – meaning the newborn's birth weight, health and gestational age. Currently, about one percent of U.S. births are the result of ART therapies such as IVF, donor eggs, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, embryo cryopreservation, embryo donation, preimplanation genetic diagnosis, and male infertility surgery and medical therapy.

The study explored several scenarios and found that the birth weight associated with standard IVF – in which the patient carried the embryo created with her own egg – was greater than that associated with donor egg cycles, and less than that in gestational carrier cycles. This finding held true even when other factors were considered showing that the woman's own uterus may be a determining factor.

Gibbons said the study also determined that a diagnosis of male infertility did not affect birth weight or gestational age, yet every female infertility diagnosis was associated with lower birth weight and a reduced gestational age.

Patients diagnosed with a uterine health issue, such as fibroids or other factors, had babies with the lowest birth weights and gestational ages. This led the researchers to examine the uterine environment as it relates to the type of therapy being considered.

Gibbons explains that in standard IVF, an embryo is transferred to a woman who has just undergone controlled ovarian hyperstimulation, while in donor egg IVF and gestational carrier IVF, the embryo is transferred to a "natural" or unstimulated uterus. Then, the researchers looked at IVF utilizing frozen embryo transfer in which an embryo created with a patient's own egg is transferred to her own unstimulated uterus. They found that babies born of frozen embryo transfer cycles had markedly greater birth weights than those born as a result of standard IVF.

"That finding may help women seeking pregnancy and their physicians to consider frozen embryo transfer as a possible option if the uterine health is not a consideration," said Gibbons. "This study shows us how so many factors are related to a successful outcome and we continue to learn where further research may be needed."

This Is Not a Lost Scene From Aliens

When I first came across this image on the right, I thought it was from a lost Aliens scene. But it is real. That's Staff Sgt. Sarah Mrak, from the 4th Special Operations Squadron. And she's inside a U.S. Air Force AC-130U aerial gunship.

Yes, an flying gunship. With real cannons. Motherbloodydancing 25mm, 40mm and 105mm side firing cannons, designed to destroy targets on the ground from the air. These planes were developed from the C-130 Hercules, evolving through numerous variants since their inception in the late 60s. The latest model—which appears in these images—is the AC-130U, which was originally introduced in 1995 for close air support, air interdiction and armed reconnaissance. One scary flying beast indeed.

U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock
by Jesus Diaz

Wi-Fi Medicine

Researchers in Boston have developed a system that has taken drug delivery to a whole new level: wireless. The system works with a small, stamp-sized chip implanted into the body. This chip contains 100 reservoirs of medicine that are released at different intervals depending on need. The chip can be monitored and controlled wirelessly. Forgetting to take your daily pills would never be an issue.

The system has been used successfully in dogs for the past six months and MicroCHIPS Inc. is saying that it should begin human testing within five years.

Medicines can't work effectively if patients don't follow their dosing schedule — a problem researchers hope to overcome by delivering drugs using an implanted microchip linked to a wireless control outside the body.

Researchers for MicroCHIPS Inc. say they've successfully controlled drug doses for up to six months in dogs that received implants in an experiment. Inside the implants were postage stamp-sized microchips containing 100 tiny reservoirs of medicine released at different intervals and amounts.

The privately held company says its first test in humans is likely three to five years away and could involve implanted sensors that would monitor a patient's circulatory system or blood glucose to manage heart disease or diabetes.

A system to release drugs in solid, liquid or gel form could come later, perhaps initially involving a medicine that isn't easily absorbed into the bloodstream when taken orally, said John Santini, president of Bedford-based MicroCHIPS.

The tests, which follow more than a decade of work by MicroCHIPS with help from two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were reported Monday in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology.

Other internal drug-delivery methods already are on the market, from insulin pumps to so-called "passive" drug implants that can't be externally controlled.

MicroCHIPS' system is far smaller than insulin pumps — its experimental implant is about the size of a small cookie, and comparable in size to an implantable heart defibrillator. The system also is unique because it uses a wireless device that potentially could control the release of multiple drugs from a single implant in the abdomen, while also monitoring drug levels and adjusting dosing accordingly, Santini said.

The experimental method shows great promise, said Dr. Henry Brem, a Johns Hopkins University neurosurgeon who has experimented with MicroCHIPS-developed chips in government-sponsored research to treat brain tumors in rats.

"It will allow not only targeted therapy, but make the treatment delivery independent of people remembering to take their medicine," said Brem, who said he has no commercial ties to MicroCHIPS.

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