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posted by martyb on Thursday September 20 2018, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the eat-only-within-10-hour-window dept.

Do IVF And Other Infertility Tech Lead To Health Risks For The Baby? Maybe

According to research [DOI: 10.1016/j.jacc.2018.06.060] [DX] published this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, children conceived through certain infertility treatments may be at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease.

Parents shouldn't panic, the study's authors say: The findings are preliminary, and the study cohort was fairly small. Still, they say, it means that families who used infertility treatments should be particularly vigilant about screening for high blood pressure in their children and help them avoid other cardiovascular risk factors, such as smoking, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.

[...] [Dr. Urs] Scherrer and his colleagues followed the health of children conceived through assisted reproductive technology for more than a decade. ART [(Assisted Reproductive Technology)] is an umbrella term that covers a number of different types of procedures, including in vitro fertilization, in which sperm and eggs are mixed in a lab dish, and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which sperm are inserted directly into eggs. Today, roughly 2 percent of all births in the U.S are conceived via ART.

In 2012, the same team of scientists published a major paper [open, DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.111.071183] [DX] showing that 65 healthy kids born with the help of ART were more likely than their peers to have early signs of problematic blood vessels. The current study, comparing 54 of those original children with 43 age- and sex-matched peers, shows those early irregularities — signs of "premature vascular aging", the scientists say — persist into adolescence and young adulthood. Kids in the study who were conceived via ART are now 16 years old, on average, but have blood vessels resembling those of middle-aged adults, the scientists found.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @08:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @08:18PM (#737713)

    So dont take the results seriously since they may be overturned but... we recommend you take this to mean you should go to the doctor more often.

    Reminds me of that zmapp study, where unblinded lab techs euthanized treated monkeys later than controls according to their opinions of how ill they looked. Since that was the "best evidence available" the team got millions of dollars for it.

    And holy crap, I looked to see what happened since and they got away with doing it in the clinical trial too:

    Although a major strength of the PREVAIL II trial was its randomized design, its weaknesses include an open-label as opposed to double-blind design (i.e., potentially influencing observational bias at the bedside) and the early termination owing to the dramatic decline in the number of infected patients.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086427/?report=classic [nih.gov]