Editorial—Recent Developments in Clinical Medicine: Reproductive Health

There is no doubt; we are living in an extraordinary era from many aspects, but especially from the aspect of reproductive sciences. In the last few years, especially in the third millennium, new and fascinating data have put old dogmas into equivocal perspectives and doubtful uncertainty … I shall briefl y address just a few of these, almost revolutionary topics. The era of assisted reproduction technology [ART], starting just thirty years ago, with the birth of the fi rst IVF baby, Louise Brown, after the pioneering studies of Steptoe and Edwards have given way to an enormous scientifi c advance, in addition to blessed fertility to millions of childless infertile couples. But the dogmas and state of the art is constantly changing. Whereas just a few years ago we all strived to retrieve and generate many ova and many embrya, to provide for as many as possible embryo transfers, the recent data and studies suggest that sometimes, “less is more”. Indeed, Murray et al. [1] have recently found that in an in vitro cultured mouse follicle system, the oocytes from fol-licles exposed to high estrogen levels had lower fertilization, regardless of high androgen concentrations. This information supports the recent tendency to avoid the high pharmacologic estrogen concentrations and many follicles development in ART/IVF cycles and prefer the more “soft ” or friendly COH proto-cols. Indeed, this is in keeping to our old publication [2,3], whereby growth hormone-binding protei