Trying to conceive? Just relax

WASHINGTON (Reuters)-old-fashioned, sense Council just relax really can work to help some women to conceive, doctors reported Monday.

For years women seeking to become pregnant were advised by friends and family to stop insisting on it--an idea that not all obstetricians and gynecologists have adopted.

But the research presented at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine at Atlanta suggests that there may be something to it.

Alice Tame, who runs a fertility Center in Boston and also works at Harvard Medical School found that women who took part in a stress management program to have a second round of assisted fertility treatment had a pregnancy rate of 160% more than women receiving IVF alone.

Tame "reproductive health experts have long wondered about the impact that stress can have on fertility, thereby preventing a woman's ability to conceive," said in a statement.

"This study shows that stress management can improve pregnancy rates, minimizing the stress of fertility management itself, improving success rates of IVF procedures, and ultimately helping to ease the emotional burden for women who are experiencing challenges trying to conceive".

She and fellow randomly 97 patients in the clinic to participate in a program of 10 sessions of body and mind while undergoing IVF treatments.

The program had no effect on how many women conceived during the first attempt, Tame said at the meeting, with 43 per cent of women getting pregnant.

But for women who failed the first time and were having a second attempt, 52 percent who participated in the programme of body and mind got pregnant, compared with just 20 percent of those who did not.

"Of course based on this study carefully designed, that a holistic approach to treatment of infertility leads to better results for patients," said Dr. r. Dale McClure, President of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

But a second study found that while therapy of complementary and alternative medicine was popular among couples receiving treatments of infertility, he didn't women more likely to get pregnant.

A team from the University of California, San Francisco questioned 431 couples undergoing infertility therapy and found that 28 percent had experienced some form of alternative medicine, mainly acupuncture or herbs, but they were not more likely to achieve pregnancy.

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