Study Finds Women's Egg Quality During IVF Is Highly Dependent on NAD+

• The quality of women's eggs is found to be dependent on NAD+, a crucial coenzyme that is needed by every cell but declines with age. 

• NAD+ ensures that the eggs retain their cellular building blocks as they mature.

• In this study, eggs without the enzyme that makes NAD+ lose too many of their building blocks in the final stage of egg maturation.  

This article was posted on the University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine News:

Increasing the levels of a chemical found in all human cells could boost a woman's fertility and help select the best eggs for IVF, according to University of Queensland research.

In the world's most in-depth study of the final steps of egg maturation, the quality of a woman's eggs was found to be significantly dependent on the important metabolic coenzyme called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+).

UQ Centre for Clinical Research scientist Professor Hayden Homer said NAD+ helps to ensure that eggs retain the bulk of their cellular building blocks as they mature.

"NAD+ is a critical coenzyme found in every cell in your body, and it's involved in hundreds of metabolic processes, but levels decline with age," Professor Homer said.

"Egg quality declines relatively early, from the age of 30 years onwards, making it increasingly difficult to get pregnant.

"If we can maintain steady levels of NAD+ we may improve a woman's chances of getting pregnant both naturally and through IVF."

Professor Homer said an increasing number of women have to resort to IVF to have children due to delays in childbearing.

Around four per cent of all children born in Australia are the result of IVF - that's the equivalent one child in every average sized classroom.

The success rates of IVF significantly drops from 35 per cent in patients under 30 years old to just eight per cent for women over 40 years of age.

However, a quarter of Australian women undergoing IVF are over the age of 40.

Professor Homer's research team made the discovery by studying the motion of spindles, the structure that pulls chromosomes apart, in living eggs undergoing maturation.

The four-year project consisted of undertaking high-resolution time-lapse imaging of live eggs lacking the NAD+ biosynthetic enzyme - Nampt.

They tracked the speed of spindles during the final stages of egg maturation and found that a "burst" of speed dependent upon NAD+ is required to prevent the egg from losing too much of its building blocks.

"With technological advances, this work will bring us closer to being able to select the best eggs for IVF treatment and to improving egg quality," Professor Homer said.

The study was published in Nature Communications in July 2020.