Women who practice stress-reduction techniques have greater success with fertility treatments, a new study says.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—“If you’d just relax, you’d get pregnant.” If women struggling with infertility had a fertilized egg for every time they heard that comment, the Octomom wouldn’t be the least bit special. To add insult to injury, it’s not true. “There’s no data to show that just relaxing increases pregnancy rates,” insists Alice Domar, PhD, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health at Boston IVF. “None.” What there is, however, is new evidence, compiled by Domar and presented this week at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Atlanta, that actively attempting to relieve stress through mind-body techniques does improve in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates for couples struggling with infertility, and dramatically at that.

THE DETAILS: Researchers under Domar’s direction looked at 97 women, all age 40 or younger, scheduled to begin their first of at least two cycles of in vitro fertilization, a process in which egg cells are fertilized by sperm outside the womb. Each woman was randomly assigned to either a control group, whose participants simply went through IVF, or a mind-body group, whose participants received 10 weekly mind-body sessions, each of which included 30 minutes of sharing and communal support, and 30 minutes devoted to teaching a different relaxation technique, including meditation and guided imagery.

At the end of the first IVF cycle, IVF success rates for the two groups were identical at 43 percent. However, at the end of the second cycle, by which time 39 percent of the mind-body group had completed one to five mind-body sessions and 58.5 percent had completed six to 10 sessions, the pregnancy rate for the mind-body group was 52 percent, while the pregnancy rate for the control group was just 20 percent. For women with at least moderate depression (a common side effect of infertility itself), the gap was even more dramatic: First-cycle pregnancy rates were 69 percent for the mind-body group and 39 percent for the control group. Second-cycle pregnancy rates were 67 percent for the mind-body group and absolutely 0 percent for the control group.