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Ovulation is when a mature egg is released from an ovary. This happens in the middle of your cycle, and it’s the time when you’re most likely to get pregnant. Within a normal cycle, this happens once. But is it possible to ovulate more than once in a cycle?
Let’s talk about it.
We’ve thought for a long time that ovulation can only happen once. New research suggests that this isn’t true, and we’ll discuss this later on. There is such a thing as releasing more than one egg at once, or hyperovulation.
In your cycle, you release an egg once. Within that ovulation, you can release more than one egg at a time. This is called hyperovulation.
Hyperovulation is not ovulating more than once. It means that when you ovulate, you’re releasing more than one mature egg. This can happen where one ovary releases more than one egg, or both ovaries release an egg at the same time.
It might be. For a long time, we thought that it wasn’t possible to ovulate twice in one regular cycle. Some evidence suggests that this is possible, and it might happen more than we know.
But first, let’s get into the physiology of ovulation.
Before ovulating, several eggs mature inside the ovary. They’re each enclosed in a sac called a follicle. The first stage of your cycle is called the follicular stage because it’s when several eggs mature inside their own follicles.
In the middle of the follicular stage, the largest egg becomes the dominant follicle. This is the one that will be released during ovulation. While several follicles mature over the follicular stage, the extra ones die once the dominant one is chosen.
Towards the end of the follicular phase, the mature follicle releases estrogen. The brain picks up on this, and the pituitary gland releases Luteinizing Hormone (LH) in response. This LH surge is what causes the follicle to push itself out of the ovary and release the egg.
We used to think that only one follicle could fully mature each month. But research published in 2003 gave us surprising new insights into the cycle of ovulation.
In this study, researchers followed follicular growth using ultrasounds on women in their childbearing years.
They found that 68% of these women had two separate “waves” of follicle development, and almost a third had three waves.
This research tells us that for many women, several eggs are maturing for release each cycle. This does not mean that you’re ovulating several times. Instead, it means that more eggs could be released than we thought.
We’re hoping for more research on ovulation and the waves of follicular development so we can learn more about this important phase of fertility. But is it possible to release more than one egg during ovulation?
Let’s understand how you may release more than one egg during each cycle.
The more eggs being released during an IUI procedure, the better the chances of conceiving. After inducing ovulation, the partner’s semen is injected into your uterus. This gives the sperm higher chances of fertilizing the multiple eggs in the uterus.
During IVF, immature eggs are harvested from your ovaries. They mature outside of your body and then are injected into the uterus. These eggs are then injected into the uterus for fertilization. This makes it much more likely that several eggs will be fertilized to make twins or triplets or multiple babies.
After you ovulate, progesterone halts other eggs from maturing and being released. Hence you can only ovulate on your ovulation day and not multiple times in one cycle. During your ovulation day, you can release multiple eggs depending on the above reasons.
This probably happens more often than we realize. Not many women get ultrasounds at this stage in their cycle, so we don’t know how many eggs are released each ovulation.
But an egg has to be fertilized for pregnancy to begin. Unfertilized eggs are released along with the uterine lining during your period. But it’s possible for multiple eggs to release during ovulation, and to also be fertilized in the fallopian tubes.
If you’re using standard ovulation testing, you may think you’re ovulating more than once in a cycle during your hyperovulation cycle when you’re actually not. This is why it’s so important to track three different fertility hormones to get the full picture of your cycle.
Standard fertility trackers tell you the levels of LH in your urine. Remember that the LH surge causes the follicle to release an egg from the ovary. Home ovulation tests aren’t actually telling you that you’re ovulating, they’re telling you that your body is trying to ovulate by producing LH.
But not every LH surge results in ovulation. In fact, some women may have several LH surges but not ovulate at all, or they have higher levels of LH all the time.
Learn More : LH Surge and Ovulation: When do you ovulate after an LH surge?
Up to 37% of cycles actually don’t result in egg release. This anovulation is the most common cause of infertility. There are a lot of reasons why a woman may not ovulate in a cycle. One of the most common reasons is stress, which inhibits specific hormones that cause ovulation.
Learn More : Anovulation: Everything you need to know about the #1 cause of infertility
But a standard fertility tracker won’t tell you whether or not you’ve ovulated. It could even tell you that you’re ovulating several times in a single cycle, when you haven’t actually released an egg at all due to the constant LH surges.
False-positive tests happen when your LH is high enough to trigger the test, but ovulation doesn’t happen. There are many reasons why these false positives can happen, here are a few of them:
The only way to definitively know whether you’ve ovulated or not is to track progesterone as well as LH and estrogen. Progesterone rises after ovulation because the now-empty follicle releases it into the bloodstream.
By getting the full picture of ovulation, you can know definitively whether or not you’ve ovulated. If your at-home fertility test is telling you that you’re ovulating over and over, try a more comprehensive fertility tracker like Inito.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1126506/
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/twins/https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)00544-2/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3773899/
https://americanpregnancy.org/getting-pregnant/infertility/ovulation-kits/#:~:text=Some%20women%20may%20have%20a,with%20the%20polycystic%20ovarian%20syndrome.
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000369.htm
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/in-vitro-fertilization/about/pac-20384716