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Context: Depending on the cause of the infertility, nonsurgical or surgical treatments may be used to treat men and women with infertility. Despite improved outcomes due to medical advances, assisted reproductive technology (ART) for couples with infertility is sometimes unsuccessful. Success may be affected by the patient's social, psychological, and physical status., Objective: The study examined the effects of yoga-including asanas (yoga poses), pranayama (proper breathing), shavasana, and meditation-on male and female fertility and ART outcomes., Design: The research team performed a literature review, electronically searching for articles published between January 1978 and January 2016 in the PubMed, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar databases., Setting: The study took place at the Reproductive Biotechnology Research Center at the Avicenna Research Institute at the Academic Center for Education, Culture, and Research (Tehran, Iran)., Participants: Participants were couples with infertility taking part in 87 reviewed studies., Intervention: Yoga was the intervention., Outcome Measures: The outcome measures comprised fertility factors in males and females, fertility rate, and ART success rate., Results: The reviewed studies showed that yoga can provide stress management for patients with infertility, with beneficial effects on fertility, helping couples give birth. They found that yoga also could reduce pain; decrease depression, anxiety, and stress; reduce the rate of assisted vaginal delivery; and improve fetal outcomes., Conclusions: Yoga can help couples overcome infertility and increase the ART success rate by improving the physiological and psychological states of both men and women.

Background: Ooplasmic transfer (OT) technique or cytoplasmic transfer is an emerging technique with relative success, having a significant status in assisted reproduction. This technique had effectively paved the way to about 30 healthy births worldwide. Though OT has long been invented, proper evaluation of the efficacy and risks associated with this critical technique has not been explored properly until today. This review thereby put emphasis upon the applications, efficacy and adverse effects of OT techniques in human., Main Body: Available reports published between January 1982 and August 2017 has been reviewed and the impact of OT on assisted reproduction was evaluated. The results consisted of an update on the efficacy and concerns of OT, the debate on mitochondrial heteroplasmy, apoptosis, and risk of genetic and epigenetic alteration., Short Conclusion: The application of OT technique in humans demands more clarity and further development of this technique may successfully prove its utility as an effective treatment for oocyte incompetence.

Purpose: The mitochondrial complement is critical in sustaining the earliest stages of life. To improve the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), current methods of interest were evaluated for increasing the activity and copy number of mitochondria in the oocyte cell., Methods: This covered the researches from 1966 to September 2015., Results: The results provided ten methods that can be studied individually or simultaneously., Conclusion: Though the use of these techniques generated great concern about heteroplasmy observation in humans, it seems that with study on these suggested methods there is real hope for effective treatments of old oocyte or oocytes containing mitochondrial problems in the near future., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. and Mitochondria Research Society. All rights reserved.)