The journey of IVF Data collection in Turkey.

Collecting and reporting data is a crucial aspect of IVF practice. During the following two decades after the first report of European IVF-monitoring Consortium (EIM) on IVF data, the number of contributing countries increased gradually reaching nearly fourty. In 2004 for the first time Turkey took part in European registry and accordingly in World registry. Starting the submission of Turkish data to EIM was an important milestone since Turkey appeared as the sixth country in relation to the number of cycles performing nearly eight percent of all European ART cycles. Turkey continued contributing to European registry for the following four years consecutively but after 2008 the input of Turkish IVF data stopped again. Strikingly, between 2004-2008 Turkey became one of the main contributors of the registry with an ability to give a full report. So far, we do not have a complete European set of data and the number of cycles reported by ESHRE EIM can easily be said to be an underestimation of the actual number of cycles. The IVF data of Turkey - a country having the seventeenth highest population in the World and appearing among the first six countries in Europe in terms of the number of ART cycles per year- will definitely contribute very much to ESHRE EIM database. Then, it is time to turn the tide and restart submitting the data to European registry, but this time regularly in a systematic method. Such an achievement will greatly contribute to the aim of EIM of achieving a complete data set.