Advanced Fertility Clinic of Chicago has an office in Gurnee and opened its Crystal Lake office in 2002, the first fertility clinic in McHenry County, Dr. Todd Deutch said.

He recently co-authored a study, presented to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about two medically supervised tests that can help identify women who will have trouble getting pregnant.

Deutch recently sat down with reporter Sarah Sutschek to talk about his chosen profession.

Sutschek: Why did you want to become a fertility specialist?
Deutch: The thing that drew me to the field is that it's unique. You get to form a very strong relationship with your patients, and then you get to bring joy into their life. I can't imagine a better profession.

Sutschek: Didn't you study engineering in college?
Deutch: When I went to school, I already knew that I wanted to be a physician, but I was very interested in engineering. I sort of had to go outside the engineering requirements to get the pre-med. It's been really beneficial; I've done work with GE and helped them with developing some of their ultrasound machines.

Sutschek: Tell me about the study you recently completed.
Deutch: The study looked at two tests that look at ovarian reserve, which is the idea that women are born with a number of eggs and throughout their lives they lose their eggs at a different rate.
One of the causes of infertility is that there aren't enough eggs left in the reserve. What our study sought to do was look at two ovarian reserve markers. ... We looked at women over the past 10 years who have had both these test done, and we found pretty marked results. If both tests were normal, the chance of success with an IVF cycle was 56 percent. If one of the test was abnormal, that dropped to 34 (percent) to 35 percent. If both were abnormal, it dropped to about 9 percent.

Sutschek: Is it difficult to tell a patient that their chances are not good?
Deutch: I think that's probably one of the most difficult things we have to do. Unfortunately, the education women are given as far as their fertility is fairly poor.
I think we're all responsible – the media, school, friends, family. A lot of times, patients come in, and they don't understand that they're really closer to the end of their reproductive lifespan than they think they are. I think most women have the idea that they have a biological clock and it's ticking, but a lot of the patients I see don't realize the clock may be ticking faster than they expected.
They see in the media women getting pregnant well into their 40s, and that is not the norm. The good news is we offer donor eggs, which is a process where, if a woman has very little chance of conceiving with her own egg, we do IVF treatment stimulating a different woman and mix her egg with the husband's sperm.

Sutschek: So the child would not be biologically the woman's?
Deutch: Genetically, it's not the woman's child. Biologically, the child is undergoing all of its growth and development inside the mother's womb. I think everyone feels a little differently about it.

Sutschek: How do you handle some of these topics that may be controversial?
Deutch: What I strive to do is educate my patients and inform them as to their options available and try to find what works within their belief system. Everyone is coming from a different background, and we don't want to do something that would make someone uncomfortable.