In response to a high volume inquiries, we’ve outlined answers to your most frequently asked questions concerning your care at our Park Avenue office, which will be moved to our Columbus Circle location due to scheduled renovations. All treatments, procedures, faxes, scans and anything regarding your care with us will be handled by our team on the West Side.

We’re still available to receive calls (212-400-9614) if you do not find your answer below.

Q: Where is the other New Hope office and how do I get there?
A: Our New Hope West Side office is conveniently located on the 4th floor of the Steelcase building at 4 Columbus Circle on the corner of W 58th and 8th Avenue. If you find yourself at Starbucks, you’re at the back of the building. Simply head towards 8th Ave and take a right, and you’ll see the Steelcase building to the left if you’re facing Duane Reade. Our front door sits on 8th Ave.

Q: What public transportation can I take to get there?
A: The M10, M20, and M104 all make stops near Columbus Circle on 59th and Broadway. For those traveling across town, the M31 and M57 stop at 58th and 8th (practically on our doorstep!). If you’re traveling by train, the A/C/B/D/1 trains all stop at 59th St, Columbus Circle, and the N/Q/R are not far away on 57th and 7th Ave. If you need details on parking, please visit us online and click the “Directions” button.

Q: If you’re closing Park Avenue, aren’t you going to be understaffed?
A: Our East and West Side family now reside under one roof. So, not only do we continue to hire new expert staff members, but now have more sonographers and doctors to help at our Columbus Circle location.

Q: But if you’re moving all your staff, won’t it be crowded?
A: Our Columbus Circle just opened its doors in 2011 and is our most modern facility in the United States to date. New Hope’s West Side location is twice as big as our Park Avenue location, with a spacious waiting area, comfortable recovery rooms, and a state-of-the-art lab where our embryologists take care of your eggs, embryos, and sperm.

Q: Speaking of eggs/embryo/sperm, mine are frozen and banked at Park Avenue, what now?
A: Your eggs/embryo/sperm are now safely banked at our larger banking facility located at 4 Columbus Circle.

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New Hope Fertility Center built itself from the ground up with the patient as our main focus.  Everything from the glass that protects our state-of-the art lab where we take care of your embryos down to the protocols were constructed with you in mind.

If you’ve explored our website, you’ll find that we pride ourselves on our minimal stimulation techniques, which help women get pregnant without exposing their bodies to lavish amounts of fertility medication. Across the United States, there is actually a known shortage of one of the main medications used in conventional IVF treatments.  Ganirelix Acetate (a GnRH antagonist) — for those who have not undergone any type of fertility treatment before — is a common injectionable used to prevent women undergoing IVF from ovulating prematurely during their treatment.  A national shortage of this drug has inhibited many clinics from moving forward in patients’ fertility treatments.

At New Hope, running low on this particular medication is never a concern when it comes to our ability to meet the needs of our patients.  Since many of our protocols focus on injectionless methods (ie. Natural Cycle) or treatments that involve low amounts of injectables (Mini-IVF™), we treat only a small volume of patients with protocols that involve the use of Ganirelix, which means you never have to worry about us running short — on Ganirelix or patient-accommodating service.

New Hope is also home to one of the larger IVF facilities in New York City.  Built with space in mind, our Columbus Center office is home to an embryology lab with close to 30% more space than conventional labs, allowing the staff that takes care of your eggs and embryos to move with fluidity throughout their workspace.  Our labs also allow ample room to house our high-efficiency air filtration system, which harnesses the power of a 737 jet engine to purify the lab’s delicate environment.

These are only a few of the ways New Hope has built its fertility center to ensure it can help a high-volume of diverse patients from around the world.  If you’ve had trouble getting the help you need from other clinics in the United States, what are you waiting for?  We’re only a few clicks away.

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Mainstream media has recently become awash with reference to a study conducted in Australia that suggests babies born via IVF are more likely to have birth defects, specifically when one sperm is injected.

Published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past weekend, analysts have speculated the study shows that IVF babies have a higher chance of having a defect when male infertility is a factor.  In these cases, only one sperm can be injected to fertilize the egg, and if it contains faulty genes, the child has no chance of escaping the onset of a defect upon birth.

The theories being developed from this story are, simply put, just theories.  As article in the Washington Post states, “the vast majority of babies are born healthy.”  Furthermore,  ”babies that resulted from simple IVF, had no greater risk of birth defects once factors such as the mom’s age and smoking were taken into account.”

There are also systems in place to prevent parents using IVF from encountering birth defect issues.  PGD and PGS testing, for instance, exist to give parents an option to test their embryos for genetic disorders and diseases before implantation.  With this type of testing becoming available at fertility clinics across the globe, patients using IVF can greatly decrease their chances of producing a child with a birth defect, even more than those giving birth naturally, who likely do not know of or have PGD and PGS testing available to them before becoming pregnant.

Read more on PGD at New Hope Fertility Center.

 

 

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New Hope Fertility Center’s Founder and Medical Director Dr. John Zhang recently returned from China’s Guangdong province after successfully completing the country’s first ovarian tissue transplant.

Along with Dr. Sherman Silber, the two New Hope doctors donated their expertise to conduct the procedure, which was performed at the Reproductive Medicine Research Center (RMRC) of the 6th Affiliated Hospital at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China.  Dr. Zhang introduced Dr. Liang of RMRC to the procedure, who had also read Silber’s publications focused on his experience with ovarian tissue transplants.

The identical twin sisters, who are 31 years of age, each underwent the minimally invasive surgery for less than 6 hours, transferring part of the healthy ovarian tissue from the donor sister to Fang (pseudonym), who suffered from premature ovarian failure (doctors speculate this was due to her exposure to chemicals at work as a young adult).

Fang’s sister was able to act as donor without either of the twins having to take anti-rejection medications since they have identical loci (the specific location of a DNA sequence a chromosome).  The two sisters left the operating room with a scar just 1 to 2 inches long, and the donor sister has since fully recovered.  Her ovarian function was not affected by the surgery since the procedure required only a small portion of her ovarian tissue.

According to Chinese reports, Fang’s ovarian failure caused her to exhibit the physiological and physical traits of a 60 year old menopausal woman.  Along with struggling with the issues that arise with infertility, Fang had to deal with looking old enough to be her twin’s mother, while also experiencing the symptoms that come with menopause — dryness, sensitivity, and depression, among other things.

Thanks to the expert hands of Dr. John Zhang and Dr. Sherman Silber; however, Fang’s premature aging is now a thing of the past.  Within a week, Fang will be able to return to a normal and healthy sex life, and within just 3 months, Fang’s ovarian function will return as regular menstruation sets in, making it possible for her to conceive naturally for the first time in 7 years.

Fang and her doctors in China decided to go forward with the ovarian transplant due to a shortage of egg donors.  Ovarian transplants yield similar pregnancy rates to those who use donor eggs to conceive, and are favorable in cases where there is a desire to restore ovarian function so the patient can conceive naturally (versus oocyte donation, which still requires fertility treatment and does not restore ovarian function).

Congratulations to the father of New Hope on this enormous achievement!

 

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As many in our online community already know, New Hope Fertility Center and one of its current patients were briefly featured on The Dr. Oz Show.

Friday’s show, which took on the subject of motherhood and age, focused much of the program debating the woman’s biological clock and the risks involved in conventional IVF care.

Indeed, self-awareness and self-education are integral parts of any woman beginning the journey to motherhood.  Through reading, talking to other women, and being open to her doctor (infertility doctor or primary care physician) about reproductive health, a woman can better judge when to start the pregnancy process.  By committing to follicular ultrasounds to test the number of eggs she has left to learning about options like fertility preservation (banking eggs for future use), women can significantly avoid the emotional and physiological stress that comes when she facing age-related fertility issues.

We also agree with both medical guests on the show, Dr. John Jain (a Reproductive Endocrinologist) and Jennifer Lahl (the President at the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network), who emphasized the importance of infertility specialists educating their patients on both the risks associated with older women getting pregnant and the risks associated with conventional IVF protocols, which oftentimes involve hyperstimulating a woman’s ovaries with fertility medication to assist her in producing multiple eggs for use in IVF treatment.

Educating would-be mothers on fertility preservation and emphasizing the fact that as they age it will become harder to get pregnant due to low ovarian reserve are among the most important things a fertility doctor, and any physician for that matter, can do for women wishing to conceive.  While these are important factors in the assisted reproduction debate, it is also important to inform women on other choices out there — holistic, minimally invasive IVF care and egg freezing (fertility preservation), both available here at New Hope Fertility Center.

Mini-IVF™ is our trademarked protocol which is customized to each individual’s body and circumstance, so no two cycles are the same. Because our Mini-IVF™ cycles are tailored, it also allows us to forgo some of the expensive (and, for some, intimidating) shots that were mentioned on the Dr. Oz show.  In addition, we try very hard to make sure that our fertility care is not a cost prohibitive part of anyone’s journey to motherhood and our cycles are also over a few thousand dollars less than the average conventional cycle cost statistic cited on the Dr. Oz show.

We also offer Natural Cycle IVF, which offers women the option to try IVF sans fertility medication.

If you viewed the Dr. Oz show on Friday and have any questions regarding the success of our IVF protocols and the cost of our IVF care, please feel free to reach out with any questions.

And…thanks for tuning in!

 

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If you’ve paid attention to the news lately, you have probably heard about the latest celebrities planning on fertility treatments to achieve pregnancy.  Not only is Khloe Kardashian attempting to get pregnant through IVF, Entertainment News host Guliani Rancic is still considering it after her double mastectomy, and a slew of other celebrities admitted to using fertility treatments to get pregnant, including Jane Seymour and Celine Dion.  And let’s not forget to mention primetime tv, with both Private Practice and Whitney exploring the subject of IVF and fertility preservation through their story lines.

Whatever your source of the latest IVF news may be, the one thing all these stories have in common is infertility.  Infertility, which is defined as an unsuccessful attempt at achieving pregnancy after one year of unprotected sex, affects a range of people.  As with the case of Khloe Kardashian, infertility is not ageist – it can affect women in their twenties as much as women in their forties, and can be caused by everything from PCOS to weight issues to autoimmune disorders (the latter being the case for Elizabeth Hasselback, who suffers from Celiac disease).

Fertility care specialists have been working for over thirty years in an effort to develop the most healthy and cost effective ways to help women achieve their dream of motherhood, no matter what their root cause of infertility may be.  At New Hope Fertility Clinic, our protocols have been developed by pioneers in the fertility field, including New Hope founder Dr. John Zhang, who is credited with the oldest in vitro pregnancy to date.  New Hope’s unique protocols provide women of all backgrounds (miscarriages, failed IVF cycles, high FSH levels) a chance to get pregnant.  By customizing our fertility treatment plans for each individual patient based on their needs and fertility background, New Hope is able to keep the health risks and high costs associated with conventional IVF treatments low through our “One Good Egg” policy and and our practice of single embryo transfers.

We wish all the celebrities on the IVF path success (and others on their fertility journey as well).

What other celebrity infertility stories have you heard?

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