JARG-18-2-comment

P1: FLF/FLK P2: FMNJournal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics PP014-290112 December 19, 2000 8:21 Style file version Oct. 14, 2000Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2001EDITORIAL1Assessing Outcome2NORBERT GLEICHERIn this issue of this Journal, Deonandan et al. pointout the limitations of life-table analyses in the evalua- See article on page 73tion of infertility treatment outcomes (1). And, whileone can continue to argue about the best statisticalmethodologies applied when assessing IVF outcome Simply stated, there is no way to compare IVF out-versus outcome of other fertility treatments, this pa- comes between programs, unless we use supercom-per should remind us that the average infertile couple puters with discriminant analyses, based on innumer-probably does not care very much what a program’s able patient variables. But is there really a need forspecific success rates for any particular treatment are. such a comparison?In fact, if patients do care about these kind of statis- In my opinion, there isn’t! Infertility patients dotical data, then they should be advised that they are not appear interested in outcome statistics based onbarking up the wrong tree! individual treatment steps. What they really want toknow when seeing a fertility specialist is, “What areWe all know and accept by now that outcome datafor fertility treatments are greatly biased by patient se- my chances to conceive in this program?” “How ...