AMH or Anti Mullerian Hormone is blood based investigation which can be carried out on a woman at any time. The significance of AMH is that it accurately tells us about a woman’s ovarian reserve – i.e. her capacity to produce eggs.
The other advantage is that AMH can be performed at any time during a woman’s menstrual cycle. This is contrast to other predictive tests like FSH and LH which need to be performed only on day 2 or day 3 of a woman’s menstrual cycle.
Based on AMH values, a woman can be further classified as:
- A poor responder if the AMH is less than 1.5
- Normoresponder if the AMH is 1.5 to 3
- Hyper responder if AMH is more than 3
Women who fall into the normoresponder category are best suited for IVF cycles and usually produce anywhere from 8 to 15 follicles on ovarian stimulation with injections in IVF cycles.
Poor responders is a hard category to deal with. This is because these women usually produce only a few follicles even when stimulated with maximum doses of injections. These are women who are usually more than 35 years of age or women who have started undergoing premature ovarian failure which could be due to a variety of factors.
The third category is that of women with AMH more than 3. These are women who often women who suffer from PCOD (Polycystic ovarian disease). These women usually have an exaggerated response to gonadotropins (IVF Injections) and produce a large number of follicles (often in excess of 25).
This excessive production of follicles can be dangerous to to a woman’s health as occasionally it can lead to accumulation of water in a woman’s abdomen (ascites) due to a phenomenon known as OHSS or ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. Hence these women need to be stimulated with caution and low dose injections so as to prevent complications.
All in all AMH is an integral investigation in the management of infertility patients and it gives us a wide array of information. We routinely recommend it for all our fertility patients at our one of the best IVF center in Mumbai.