Diet and pravastatin administration prior to in vitro fertilization treatment may improve pregnancy outcome in women with dyslipidemia

Abstract

In this study, we aimed to identify whether using statins may increase the chance of pregnancy in In Vitro Fertilisation / Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (IVF/ICSI) patients with hyperlipidaemia. Therefore, in this retrospective cohort study, 70 patients constituted the study population and all patients were managed by lipid lowering diet. Ten mg pravastatin (pravachol DEVA, Istanbul, Turkey) was added to therapy in case of resistant hypercholesterolaemia after 15 days of the diet. Fifty-one patients were treated with diet only and the remaining nineteen patients were offered both diet and pravastatin. Clinical pregnancy rate was significantly better with the patients who used pravastatin (68.4% vs. 39.2%, p = .029). Ongoing pregnancy rates were 63.2% and 33.3% with pravastatin and diet only, respectively, which were statistically significant (p:.024). According to multivariate analysis, pravastatin use was found independently and statistically significant for clinical pregnancy and ongoing pregnancy rate after IVF/ICSI in patients with dyslipidemia (HR 3.79; 95% CI 1.31–10.97; p:.014 and HR 3.18; 95% CI 1.22–8.27; p:.018). When we analysed stratified data according to the AMH levels, we noticed that as AMH levels increased, the pregnancy rates increased; the most benefit from pravastatin was in the group with AMH levels >2 ng/mL.

IMPACT STATEMENT

• What is already known on this subject? Dyslipidemia in In IVF/ICSI patients with polycystic ovary syndrome had negative impact on pregnancy rates

• What the results of this study add? The findings of the study support that pravastatin may help to improve pregnancy outcome, especially in normal and high responders, regardless of whether decreased serum LDL or total cholesterol level.

• What the implications are of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? As a result of our data, we speculated that it should be routine to investigate the lipid profile in every IVF/ICSI patient and should be treated accordingly, if necessary.

Keywords:

• Dyslipidemia
• In Vitro fertilisation treatment
• infertile patient
• pravastatin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).