In the time it takes to watch “Friends,” a couple struggling to have a baby can find out whether they’re fertile thanks to a home kit now being tested by scientists.
The first “his and hers” fertility kit is expected to help thousands by giving them an early warning of infertility problems and help them choose in-vitro fertilization more quickly if needed.
Developed by a scientist at Britain’s Birmingham University, the “Fertell” kit is expected to be available over the counter in the United States by early next year and cost under $100.
The tests have proven to be 95 percent accurate, according to scientists.
“Every passing year for couples trying to have children sees a decreasing chance of a live birth, particularly as the woman passes through her 30s,” said Christopher Barratt, the professor of Human Reproduction at Birmingham, who developed the test with the London-based medical devices company Genosis.
“Instead of waiting for a year, this test gives you the results in an hour.”
According to Barratt, each device – a cylinder smaller than a coffee mug – will display the results much like a home pregnancy test, with an easy-to-read pair of red lines.
The female test works in 15 minutes and the male in about half an hour.
The kit for men measures the amount of active, or “motile,” sperm from a small sample placed in the Fertell cylinder.
The sperm is mixed with artificial cervical mucus that mimics the female reproductive tract. The motile sperm, which is the only sperm that can swim through the mucus and fertilize an egg, will be tagged, collected and counted.
If there are 10 million motile sperm per milliliter of semen, a red line will appear, giving the man a clean bill of health. A second red line will appear to indicate the test has worked.
The female’s is a urine test that measures levels of follicle stimulating hormone, which increases as the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries decline. The higher the hormone, the less chance the woman will become pregnant.
Barratt, who presented his study yesterday at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lausanne, Switzerland, said the test does not detect problems with the womb or Fallopian tubes.