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   Tuesday December 27 2016
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High stress cuts chance of successful IVF

   Oliver Moody, Science Correspondent

   October 18 2016, 12:01am, The Times
   The odds of conceiving through IVF could improve if women took measures
   to relax more, researchers sayGetty Images

   Chronic stress may hinder women’s chances of having a baby through IVF,
   a study suggests.

   Each year 50,000 women in the UK go through the procedure, where their
   eggs are fertilised in a test tube before being implanted in the womb.
   About one in four of these operations results in a live birth.

   In the first study of its kind, researchers at the University of
   Nottingham measured cortisol, a hormone that is thought to track stress
   levels, in the hair of 88 women trying to conceive through IVF. The
   results, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, suggest
   that those with elevated levels of the chemical, which could correspond
   to sustained stress, are almost a third less likely to become pregnant.

   Adam Massey, the lead author, said…
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