More questions for the Doctors

Can the embryologist explain to me what made my eggs poor quality. Were they chromosomally abnormal? Was the zona too thick? What made the actual egg poor quality? And what criteria did she base a grade c for my embryo? I know it had fragmentation, I seen that in the pic, but what else was wrong with it? It was a four cell, and seem pretty normal looking besides fragmentation. Thanks.
Brett & Rebecca Brumfield

Dear Rebecca and Brett,
Greetings from Rotunda! I am Goral, Laboratory Director at Rotunda. This is with reference to your mail to Dr. Tambe regarding your oocyte and embryo quality.
Assessment of oocyte maturity and quality (morphological appearance) at the time of retrieval is difficult as the egg is obscured by a large cumulus mass that hinders adequate scoring. However, in your case, both the oocytes had very scanty cumulus mass and the oocyte in the center of the mass appeared very dark and granular. Hence they were graded as poor quality oocytes. In general, the way we assess the "quality" of embryos at Rotunda is by determining 3 major components. Cell number, cell regularity (regularity of size), and degree of fragmentation. There are also other things that are noted about the embryos appearance, such as multinucleation, presence of vacuoles, granularity, thickness of the zona around the embryo, etc. Your embryo had one blastomere with multinucleation. Embryos with one or more multinucleated blastomeres have a poorer implantation potential than embryos with mononucleated blastomeres. At our center, all embryos with multinucleation are graded as Grade C.
With regards,
Goral Gandhi
Date: Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 5:42 AMSubject: Re: test resultsTo: Gautam Allahbadia <rotundachr@gmail.com>

Now, I don't know about all your gals' opinions, I will have to inquire about this also, but after all my research on the net, all embryos with multinucleation should never be implanted in the uterus, and should be discarded. Anyone had any experience with this? I also called my RE here in the states and he stated the same concern, should have never been an embryo transfer.