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More evidence that hormone testing for women's fertility does not work.
更多證據表明，檢測女性生育能力的荷爾蒙測試并不奏效。
Women seeking to defer motherhood are often encouraged to check their fertility.
人們通常會鼓勵希望推遲生育時間的女性檢測自己的生育能力。
Though fecundity is tied to age, the effect of time's passage varies.
雖然生育能力與年齡有關，但其對不同人的影響不同。
Some 35-year-olds find they cannot get pregnant.
一些人35歲發現自己無法懷孕。
Others manage at the first attempt.
還有人第一次嘗試就能成功。
The main causes of fertility's reduction with advancing years are declines in the number and quality of the eggs in a woman's ovaries.
生育能力隨著年齡增長而下降的主要原因是，女性年齡越大，卵巢中卵子的數量越少，質量越低。
Unlike men, who manufacture sperm throughout their post-pubertal lives, albeit in ever-decreasing quantities, all of a woman's potential eggs develop while she is still a fetus.
而男性則不同。雖然男性制造精子的數量會不斷減少，但他們在青春期后始終都在制造精子；而女性的所有卵子都是在胎兒時期開始發育的。
A newborn girl has over 1m of them.
一個剛出生的女孩有100多萬個卵子。
By puberty, she is left with about 400,000.
到了青春期，就只剩下大約40萬。
When the menopause arrives, that has been whittled down below 1,000, which are likely to be duds.
到了更年期，卵子數量會低于1000，并且很可能質量很低。
But fertility tests currently on offer neither count the number of eggs remaining nor assess their quality.
但目前為女性提供的生育測試既不計算其剩余的卵子數量，也不評估卵子的質量。
Rather, they rely on an indirect approach - sampling what are hoped to be relevant hormones.
這些測試依賴于一種間接的方法——對可能與女性生育能力相關的荷爾蒙進行采樣。
Hormone tests do have some value in estimating the timing of menopause and the success of harvesting eggs for in vitro fertilisation.
荷爾蒙測試在預測更年期的時間和預測采集卵子進行體外受精的成功率方面確實有一定的價值。
But forecasting pregnancy?
但在預測懷孕方面呢？
The evidence suggests that they can't.
證據表明，荷爾蒙測試在這方面沒有效果。
One test-sceptic is Anne Steiner of the Duke Fertility Centre, in North Carolina.
北卡羅來納州杜克生育中心的安妮·斯坦納就對測試持懷疑態度。
She suspects hormone tests do indicate how many eggs are left to a woman, but that this is not what matters - rather, it is the eggs' quality which is crucial.
她認為荷爾蒙測試確實能檢測一個女人還剩下多少卵子，但這并不是問題的關鍵——卵子的質量才是關鍵。
Between 2008 and 2016 Dr. Steiner and her colleagues ran the Time to Conceive study.
2008至2016年，斯坦納博士和她的同事們進行了“懷孕時間”研究。
Its purpose was to determine whether hormone levels could indeed assess a woman's fertility, independent of her age.
目的是在不考慮年齡的情況下，確定荷爾蒙水平是否能夠評估女性的生育能力。
The team found then that those levels had no value in predicting pregnancy in the year subsequent to testing.
研究小組隨后發現，荷爾蒙水平測試無法預測一年內是否能夠懷孕。
Now, in a follow up to the original investigation, just published in Fertility and Sterility, Dr. Steiner has shown that they have no longer-term predictive power, either.
現在，在剛剛發表在《生育與不育》期刊上的后續研究中，斯坦納博士表明，荷爾蒙水平也無法用于更長期的預測。
