What happens to an egg with age

The egg you ovulate this month has been with you since before you were born. It formed while you were a foetus, stopped halfway through its division and stayed there, paused, waiting its turn. When that turn finally comes, it may have been on hold for thirty-eight years.

That is what makes female fertility behave unlike almost any other tissue in the body. Skin renews itself. The liver regenerates. Eggs do not: the ones you have are the ones you had, and they have lived through exactly what you have.

What runs out is not the egg, it is its energy

The usual conversation about age and fertility stops at how many eggs are left. But the count is not the only thing that changes, and often it is not what decides the outcome.

Three things happen inside the cell at once:

1. 01

   Mitochondria yield less

   They are the cell's powerhouses, and the egg has more of them than any other cell. Over the years they produce less ATP, the currency cell division is paid in.¹

2. 02

   Oxidative stress builds up

   Decades of metabolism leave residue. That damage accumulates on the DNA and on the mitochondria themselves, in a loop that feeds itself.²

3. 03

   The cytoskeleton loses order

   It is the scaffold that lines the chromosomes up before sharing them out. If it becomes disorganised, the split comes out uneven, and that is where chromosomal alterations come from.³

All three are the same story told from different angles: the problem is not that the egg is old, it is that it ran out of what it needs.

Why that decides whether there is an embryo

Fertilising an egg is relatively easy. The hard part comes afterwards.

Over the following days, that single cell has to divide again and again, handing over a complete set of chromosomes each time. Every division costs energy and demands precision. An egg without reserves can fertilise perfectly well and stop on day three, or carry on with a chromosome count that is wrong.

What can be done about it

For years, the answer was nothing. You could stimulate more, select the resulting embryo better and improve the culture medium, but you could not improve the egg it came from. When quality was the problem, the conversation ended in egg donation.

That is where oocyte restoration comes in. If what is missing is energy machinery, the question stops being how do we choose better and becomes can we replace what is missing without touching the nucleus.

That is exactly what IVF MORE® does: it works on the cytoplasm, which is where the energy lives, and leaves the nucleus alone, which is where your genetic information lives.

How restoration works, step by step