Fertility testing for women in Dublin

We see women every week who have had one isolated blood test, sometimes a single AMH result, and been sent away with a number and not much else. A number on its own does not tell the whole story. The meaning depends on when in your cycle a test was taken, what it was measured against, and what the rest of the picture looks like alongside it.

So we test at specific points in the cycle, for specific reasons. A Day 3 hormone profile, drawn at the start of your cycle, tells us how your pituitary and thyroid are behaving before ovulation begins. A Peak+7 blood test, timed to the days after ovulation, tells us whether that ovulation was actually a good one. AMH tells us something different again: the size of the follicle pool you are working from. Each test answers a different question, and together they build a picture no single test gives on its own.

AMH tells us the size of the pool. It does not tell us what this cycle's follicle is actually doing.

What a fertility test for women includes

• AMH blood test, a marker of ovarian reserve (EUR 80)
• Day 3 hormone blood profile: FSH, LH, prolactin, TSH, and DHEA, taken once at the start of your cycle (EUR 250)
• Peak+7 blood test: oestradiol and progesterone, taken on one of four days, 6 to 9 days after your identified peak day (EUR 50 per test)
• Cycle charting with ChartNeo, the app we use to read the timing and quality of your ovulation
• Ultrasound follicle tracking, where advised, to see what a cycle is actually doing in real time

What we look at, and why

Day 3 bloods give us a baseline picture of where you are at the start of the cycle, before ovulation. We look at FSH and LH to assess how hard your pituitary is working to recruit a follicle. We look at prolactin and TSH to rule out hormonal interference with ovulation. And we look at DHEA, an androgen precursor that is routinely left off a standard panel. In our published 2025 cohort of 187 couples, 31% showed a shortage of DHEA and related androgens after our full workup. Before they came to us, none had been identified with that finding (Boyle et al., JRRM 2025).

The Peak+7 blood test is where the quality of ovulation shows up. We look for progesterone above 60 nmol/L and oestradiol above 400 pmol/L at that point in the cycle. A standard day-21 progesterone test only tells you whether ovulation happened at all. Peak+7 tells us whether it was a good one. In Dr. Boyle's clinical experience, approximately 8 out of 10 couples with impaired fertility show suboptimal hormone levels when properly assessed at Peak+7, even when a cycle looks unremarkable on paper.

This testing is the starting point of the restorative investigation described in full on our women's fertility page, which covers unexplained infertility, low AMH, endometriosis, PCOS, and recurrent miscarriage. We evaluate both partners from the first appointment. Male factor is part of the picture in roughly 40% of couples with impaired fertility, so we test the male partner alongside you.