• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

In Vitro Fertilization is Found Safe to Children, With Exceptions

Posted on: Friday, 5 November 2004, 18:00 CST

Does in vitro fertilization harm children's health?

Infertility researchers offered a mostly reassuring answer recently, but with caveats.

On one hand, there appears to be no connection between IVF and developmental problems, cancer, deformities or overall health difficulties, based on studies of children age 8 and younger.

On the other hand, IVF dramatically raises the risk of multiple births, which in turn is linked to prematurity. And even single IVF babies are twice as likely to be born prematurely, underweight and die within a week as babies who are conceived naturally, the researchers concluded.

"It does appear that even a singleton IVF pregnancy is a high- risk pregnancy," Marcelle Cedars, an infertility specialist at University of California, San Francisco, told the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Cedars is part of a six-member panel of experts assembled a year ago at Johns Hopkins University to analyze the hundreds of studies that have looked at IVF and children's health.

Even though more than a million IVF babies have been born worldwide since the first one 26 years ago, questions about safety persist. In the United States, about 40,000 babies - 1 percent of all newborns - are now conceived by uniting egg and sperm in a lab dish, then placing two or more embryos in a woman's uterus.

The researchers found about 2 percent of singleton IVF babies died within a week of birth - twice the rate of naturally conceived babies.

However, this higher risk was not found with IVF twins. Compared with naturally conceived twins, IVF twins actually had slightly lower death rates in the first week. (Higher multiples were not studied because the numbers were too small to be reliable.)

"Twins always do less well than singletons, but IVF did not worsen the outcomes for twins," said panel member Kathy Hudson, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins.

The researchers also found that while singleton IVF babies were more likely to be born early and underweight, they grew normally and caught up by age 1. IVF had no discernible impact on the intelligence, motor skills and emotional and general development of IVF babies, whether singleton or multiple births.

Existing research has not linked IVF and childhood cancers or malformed body parts; however, several rare genetic syndromes are an emerging concern. These syndromes cause a varying array of physical and mental abnormalities.

A few studies have detected an increased risk of two such syndromes among IVF babies, but the numbers are too tiny to be more than suggestive.

More research is needed, the experts agreed, to figure out whether the apparent increased risks of IVF - however few or rare - are due to the nature of the procedure, parental characteristics or some unrecognized factor.

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

More News in this Category