Drospirenone-Primed Ovarian Stimulation Versus GnRH Antagonist Protocol in Poor Ovarian Responders Undergoing Freeze-All IVF/ICSI

Overview

Participants will: * Take either drospirenone (a daily pill) or the standard daily injection during their ovarian stimulation cycle, alongside their regular fertility hormone injections * Undergo egg retrieval, with all resulting embryos frozen (no fresh embryo transfer in this study) * Have a frozen embryo transferred in a later cycle * Complete two short questionnaires about their treatment experience - once before starting the injections/pills, and once after the stimulation phase ends * Be followed to determine if the embryo transfer results in a pregnancy

Single-center, open-label, 1:1 parallel-group pilot RCT, stratified by POSEIDON group. Superiority framing is not used - this pilot is not powered for hypothesis testing on efficacy outcomes; those are reported descriptively with 95% confidence intervals. Freeze-all is mandated in both arms by protocol (not patient choice). No patient is offered fresh transfer in either arm, so no patient is excluded for requesting one; this is stated explicitly in the consent process so expectations are set at enrollment. Both arms use a unified flexible start, triggered by leading follicle diameter reaching 14mm - not a fixed calendar day. Rather than fixing both arms to the same stimulation day (which would not account for individual variability in follicular growth rate, a particular concern in POR), both the antagonist and the drospirenone are initiated on the same physiological trigger: once the leading follicle reaches 14mm, whichever arm the patient is randomized to. This achieves genuine unification across arms (identical starting criterion, applied identically) while remaining individualized to each patient's own stimulation pace. This design has direct precedent, as described in Section 2, and retrospective evidence in POR specifically favors flexible-start over fixed-day dosing on oocyte and fertilization outcomes without increased LH-surge risk.