Abstract
Author(s): Haitham Abdelmohsen Elsabaa, Mohamed El Mandoh Mohamed, Ahmed Mohamed Salah Koura* and Tarek Hesham Elsayed
Background: Leptin is a hormone released mostly by adipocytes that regulates energy balance by boosting energy expenditure and limiting food intake, playing an important role in body weight regulation.
Aim of the Work:The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between follicular fluid leptin concentrations and IVF/ICSI success in the form of clinical pregnancy.
Patients and Methods: This prospective observational cohort study was carried out at Ain Shams University Maternity Hospital's Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) unit from June 2020 to January 2022 on a total of 92 subfertile women, where follicular fluid was aspirated and collected from follicles after oocyte isolation to determine the leptin level.
Results: The current study revealed no statistically significant differences in pregnancy based on age, BMI, reasons of sub-infertility, or trial number. The findings of our study revealed that oocyte quality, Fertilization rate, Embryos number, Embryos quality, and Embryos transfer day were statistically substantially higher in positive clinical pregnant cases, with no significant difference in Oocytes retrieved and Embryos transferred number. In terms of Follicular Fluid Leptin, our findings demonstrated that it was statistically lower among positive clinical pregnant cases, with no statistically significant difference between causes of sub-infertility and trial number. Consequently, follicular fluid leptin had a statistically significant positive correlation with gonadotrophin dose, as well as a statistically significant negative correlation with fertilization rate, cleavage rate, embryo number, embryo quality, and embryo transfer day. Our results revealed that Follicular fluid leptin had significant moderate diagnostic performance with a cut-off value of ≤ 112.0 ng/mL with high Sensitivity, Negative Predictive value and Negative likelihood ratio in predicting pregnancy occurrence.
Conclusion: Leptin concentration in the follicular fluid may be an important predictive marker of a successful outcome of IVF treatment. However, combining leptin in serum and/or FF with other factors such as BMI, may act as useful and more informative marker to predict IVF outcome.