Beata Blazkova: Availability Bias in Embryology
Beata Blazkova, ESHRE-Certified Senior Clinical Embryologist at Prague Fertility Centre, shared a post on LinkedIn:
”Availability Bias.
We saw embryos with prominent vacuoles in two patients in a row.
Both cases had an unfavourable outcome.
And suddenly, we started paying much more attention to them.
Every time we saw vacuoles again, they seemed more significant.
‘Look. There are vacuoles again.’
‘Maybe this actually means something.’
But nothing had really changed. We checked the lab, the processes were unchanged and the conditions were stable.
Two patients had simply happened to come one after another with a similar finding.
Our brains had done what they are very good at doing.
They had connected the dots.
This is availability bias.
When something is fresh and memorable, we tend to overestimate how common or important it really is.
And embryology is full of memorable cases.
The beautiful embryo that failed. The embryo with high fragmentation that implanted. The embryo that looked poor but resulted in a live birth.
We remember these cases much more easily than the hundreds of ordinary ones.
The problem is when a memorable case becomes our mental reference point.”
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