Recurrent pregnancy loss ( RPL or recurrent abortion or habitual abortion) is one of the most perplexing problems for infertility specialists today, A woman is said to have RPL if she has had 2 or more failed clinical pregnancies. These patients are understandably desperate and frustrated and unhappy . They want to know why they’re losing their pregnancies again and again , and they want to find a doctor who will help them find the problem and solve it for them , so that they can finally have a deeply loved baby .
It’s not just these patients who are frustrated –doctors are also clueless about how to manage them because we still do not have the technology to be able to pinpoint why these miscarriages occur in most of these women. Yes, we do a thorough medical workup to rule out correctable problems ( for example , a septum in the uterus , or hypothyroidism), but often we are not able to find anything , and all the test results come back as normal .
This causes patients to get even more upset , because they are worried that if we cannot find the underlying reason for the miscarriages , then how will we be able to help them to have a baby. They are petrified that their next pregnancy will also miscarry , and this is why they are happy to clutch at straws.
This is the reason why there are so many treatment options for women with recurrent pregnancy losses , and one of the most popular ( and most controversial as well) ones is immune therapy . This comes in various different shapes and forms , including intravenous immunoglobulin , or LIT – which stands for paternal lymphocyte immunization therapy .
LIT therapy for recurrent miscarriage involves extracting white blood cells from the father, using this to immunise the mother by injecting them into her, and then administering repeated treatments until the putative killer cell activities of her killer WBCs ( which are believed to cause the miscarriage by “killing “ the genetically foreign embryo ) come to normal levels.
There are many websites which sell this particular option , and there are lots of women who believe that they finally had a baby after 3 or 4 miscarriages because they took this treatment .
However, the fact of the matter is that this is not true ! While they give the credit to the LIT, they would have had a healthy baby even without the LIT.
This may sound very counterintuitive , because logically one would think that if someone has had 3 miscarriages , then their chances of miscarrying the 4th time without any additional intervention would be extremely high . One would guess that their chance of having a healthy baby would be as low as 10% , which is why whenever they take LIT treatment and then go on to have a healthy baby , they give the LIT treatment all the credit . And the LIT doctors are very happy to take this undeserved credit as well !
Many patients take LIT and miscarry again , but these patients usually will not share their experiences online, and they will not even go back and provide feedback to the LIT doctor , because they are frustrated and upset , and assume they’ve been taken for a ride . This is why you only read success stories after LIT online , but these are misleading , because they don’t represent the full picture .
Denmark provides free nationalised healthcare for all its citizens, and has centralised specialised recurrent miscarriage clinics to which all these patients are referred , which is why they have a lot of experience and expertise in treating these women.
They have found that women with even 5 or 6 recurrent miscarriages who have a completely normal work up will still go on to have a healthy baby which just one intervention , which is called TLC or tender loving care ( which includes psychological support and sympathetic counselling). You can read more about this in the article , Prognosis for Live Birth in Women With Recurrent Miscarriage at http://www.lidegaard.dk/Publ/12%20Lund.pdf
Yes, this is nonintuitive , but this is what the data shows , and you cannot argue with the truth. But what this means is that any clinic which provides TLC along with any other intervention (such as LIT) will have a high success rate in treating these women, because they automatically provide TLC along with the LIT !
The LIT doctor is happy to take all the credit , because these successful women shower them with gifts and praises, and this is why these doctors are so biased .
This is why LIT therapy has become so popular today. It’s expensive, which means it’s profitable to provide this. And because RPL patients are so frustrating to treat , most doctors are quite happy to refer them to specialised clinics , who will take a special interest in providing treatment , even though LIT is extremely expensive and extremely useless . This is something which patients often do not understand – and what is even worse is that doctors do not understand this basic truth either, which is why they continue misleading their patients by referring them for LIT.