Introduction
Endometriosis is an inflammatory disorder and defined as presence of endometrial like tissue outside of the uterus and it’s estimated prevalence is 10-15% in reproductive women.(1) It mainly induces infertility and prevalence of endometriosis rises above 40% in infertile women since endometriosis causes distortion of pelvic anatomy, impaired peritoneal function, altered implantation and decreased ovarian reserve. (2–6)
Treatment of endometriosis related infertility (ERI) is based on surgery, assisted reproductive technology (ART) or both of them. Assisted reproductive technologies may be ineffective in some cases with ERI since the all these factors listed above make the treatment more difficult. ICSI (intra cytoplasmic sperm injection) cycles frequently are being cancelled because of inefficient ovarian response to stimulation, low number or quality of collected oocytes(7), fertilization arrest or maturation arrest. In a study reported by Kuroda , it was found that cancellation rate of cycles (including cases of empty follicle, degenerating and unfertilized egg) were 35.5% in unoperated endometrioma, 47.1% in operated endometrioma, 40% in endometriosis with no endometrioma and 14.8% in tubal factor infertility.(8) Bongianni et. al. also found that cancellation rate was 7.5% in unoperated endometrioma, 9.8% in operated endometrioma and 2.9% in tubal factor infertility and commented as the cancellation rates are higher in ERI.(9) The reason of these high cancellation rates is still unclear. There is no study about whether which factors affect the cancellation rate in ERI.
In this study we aimed to elucidate the factors affecting the cancellation of cycle, depending on the phenotypes of endometriosis and other characteristics of the cycles.