A mild IVF treatment that has fewer distressing side-effects for women could cut hundreds of pounds from treatment bills and make therapy more affordable to the NHS, leading doctors said yesterday.

Research has shown that the IVF drug regime rarely used in Britain is significantly cheaper than the standard approach and barely reduces the chances of a normal pregnancy.

The technique uses lower doses of fewer drugs to stimulate the ovaries to produce extra eggs and costs £800 less than other IVF treatments, a study from the Netherlands has found.

The NHS could save thousands of pounds more if it combined the milder IVF with a single embryo transfer policy that would prevent most twin and triplet births, according to the research led by Marinus Eijkemans, of the Utrecht University Medical Centre.

As well as being cheaper, the mild method spares women the menopausal symptoms that are often triggered by conventional IVF, and reduces the risk of complications that occasionally cause kidney failure and death.

It takes half as long as conventional treatment cycles, which makes it simpler for women to combine therapy with work or caring for other children.

Fertility doctors said that the new approach, which is used routinely in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, should be adopted by British clinics.

“Mild IVF is science-based and patient-centred, and it is going to be the future of fertility treatment,” said Geeta Nargund, a consultant in reproductive medicine at St George’s Hospital in London, who is also president of the International Society for Mild Approaches in Assisted Reproduction (Ismaar).

“It significantly reduces side-effects, and the new data show that it is cheaper. In the UK, only about a quarter of IVF cycles are currently funded by the NHS, because of the cost. I think this has the potential to make a difference.”

Dr Eijkemans’s study, which he will present today at the Ismaar conference in London, compared the costs of conventional and mild IVF in a controlled trial. Although the conventional method led to slightly more pregnancies, each pregnancy cost £4,000 more than mild IVF.

The extra costs of conventional IVF were mainly attributable to health problems that resulted from the higher multiple birthrate caused by the use of two embryos. “The benefits become even greater when you consider the cost to the economy of women who stop work because of the side-effects that come with conventional treatment,” Dr Eijkemans said.

Bart Fauser, also of the Utrecht centre, said: “The cost-effectiveness data of mild IVF are compelling. You are looking at a 20 to 30 per cent reduction in costs per cycle, and if you combine this with single embryo transfer you bring the costs down still farther.”

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