Use of adjunctive growth hormone in IVF may improve the pregnancy and live birth rates for women responding poorly to ovarian stimulation, according to a Cochrane review.

The authors caution, however, the evidence for these findings is of ‘low’ or ‘very low’ certainty and larger randomised controlled trials are needed.

Their search of the literature turned up 14 randomised trials including a total of 1272 women considered poor responders according to individual trial definitions — typically women over 40 years with at least one other risk factor for a poor ovarian response.

Included trials compared an IVF treatment with the adjuvant growth hormone (GH) to the same treatment without GH (with the addition of placebo in some, but not all, studies).