Effectiveness of supplement ingredients on infertility treatment in advanced aged women

Despite the remarkable progress made in reproductive medical technology in recent years, there has been no improvement in overall pregnancy and birth rates for the rising number of infertile patients. This is thought to be due to the increase in intractable infertility with ovarian dysfunction, as the desired age of pregnancy has increased for women. The aim of this article is to review preclinical studies that used laboratory animals and other tools to examine the effectiveness of diverse supplement ingredients on age-related ovarian dysfunction as well as recent human clinical trials using supplement ingredients.

We summarized the articles discussing the effectiveness of supplement ingredients on infertility treatment in advanced-aged women by searching PubMed, Cochrane, EMBASE, and Google Scholar databases until December 2022.

Supplements are relatively inexpensive and convenient for patients, as they can be purchased at the will of the individual and from among multiple options. Although supplements have been demonstrated to have certain effects in animal studies, evidence of their effectiveness in humans is either lacking or insufficient for reaching a definite conclusion. This may be due to the lack of standardized diagnostic criteria for ovarian dysfunction and poor responders, unclear optimal dosages and duration of supplement intake, and well-designed randomized clinical trials.

Additional lines of evidence on the effectiveness of supplements in patients with ovarian dysfunction at an older age need to be accumulated in the future.