ESHRE PGD Consortium data collection IV: May-December 2001.

The ESHRE PGD Consortium was formed in 1997 to survey the practice of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Since then, three reports have been published giving an overview on PGD from an ever-increasing number of centres and reporting on an increasing number of PGD cycles and pregnancies and babies born after PGD. After these initial influential publications, important shortcomings were identified primarily on the method of data collection, i.e. with Excel spreadsheets, and in the timing of the collection (cycles were collected in a different time frame from pregnancies and babies, making the follow-up of cycles very difficult). This is why the Steering Committee has made a major investment in developing and implementing a new database in FileMaker Pro 6. It was also decided that cycles would be collected from one calendar year, as well as the pregnancies and babies ensuing from that particular calendar year. This gave us the opportunity to take a closer look at the data collected earlier, and to attempt to improve their quality. This is a report on the corrected data from the first three data collections (I-III) as well as the result of the last data collection (IV) that was completely carried out using the new database.