Technique Made Twins, Never Quints

Doctors placed five embryos in Joyce Bowman to improve her chances of conceiving a child.

There were strikes against her.

She was in her late 30s. She’d suffered one miscarriage. None of the five fertilized embryos were graded as excellent.

“We had obviously a huge, huge success,” said nurse Gretchen Sewall, donor egg manager at the Fertility and Endocrine Center at the University of Washington Medical Center. “It’s pretty rare that we’d have such an outcome.”

Unheard of, actually. The Seattle center has been performing the technique, called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, for 2-1/2 years. The method’s the most technical reproductive method available, kind of a last-ditch effort when others have failed.

It’s been performed on 136 women, 52 of whom have conceived. There have been single pregnancies, there have been twins. No triplets. No quadruplets.

“Certainly not any quintuplets,” Sewall said.

The Bowmans’ five babies are even more remarkable considering that the quality of Joyce’s embryos were ranked from “poor” to “good,” Sewall said.

Roger and Joyce Bowman have been trying for 14 years, suffering a miscarriage after one attempt at in-vitro fertilization in 1989.

Old-school in-vitro fertilization takes eggs from the woman and places each in a petri dish with sperm from the man. The dishes are incubated for two days.

With the Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection method, a single sperm is injected into an egg. The entire procedure is done under a microscope within a half-hour to three hours after the eggs are harvested.

For patients like Joyce Bowman, who are 38 and older, embryos are then drizzled in a thin stream of an acid-salt solution. This thins the outside wall of the embryo and helps the embryo attach to the uterus wall. The embryos are then transferred into the mother’s uterus.

Staff at the UW center suspected Bowman carried twins after identifying two fetuses on an early ultrasound. They were surprised to learn in April that she carried quintuplets.

Their story is spreading. “I had a patient this morning who said, ‘You’re not going to give me five, are you?”’ Sewall said.

, DataTimes