In the era of direct-to-consumer ovarian reserve tests, General Practitioners desire more education on these tests

Abstract

More than 29 million General Practitioner (GP) consultations take place annually. The number of visits relating to fertility is increasing, following the introduction of publicly-funded fertility treatment and the increasing trend of women seeking anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) testing privately. Ovarian reserve tests (ORTs) such as AMH are useful to help predict oocyte yield for treatments such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) but they do not accurately predict the chance of conception. Female age is the single best predictor of fertility. Best practice guidelines recommend against AMH testing outside of the context of infertility, but nonetheless many women seek to have direct to consumer AMH testing. These tests cost €50–100 and are often sold with limited or no pre or post-test counselling, and websites selling these tests often give misleading information, including the ability of AMH to predict future fertility.

We wished to assess GP’s knowledge of and attitudes towards ORTs and their confidence interpreting these tests. We performed a cross-sectional study involving an anonymous questionnaire sent to GPs via SurveyMonkey.