Dispelling concerns about children conceived through infertility treatments

More and more people in the world are being conceived with the help of ART. To date, ART – in vitro fertilisation (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection and embryo transfer – has resulted in more than 8 million births worldwide, a figure that is expected to continue rising in the future.

Ever since the first ART birth more than 40 years ago, there have been questions about its effect on the health of children conceived this way. So, how does such a birth affect a child’s development when compared with that of a child that was conceived naturally? According to a recent study supported by the EU-funded ART-HEALTH and LIFECYCLE projects, differences in the growth, weight and body fat levels of children conceived through ART are small and no longer apparent by late adolescence.

“This is important work,” remarks the study’s first author Dr Ahmed Elhakeem of ART-HEALTH project coordinator and LIFECYCLE project partner University of Bristol, United Kingdom (UK), in an article posted on ‘Newswise’. “Over the last three decades conception by ART has increased. In the UK just over one in 30 children have been conceived by ART, so we would expect on average one child in each primary school class to have been conceived this way. Since the first birth of a child by IVF, concerns have been raised about the risks to the children conceived.”For the purposes of the study, the researchers used data on over 158 000 infants, children, adolescents and young adults from Europe, Asia-Pacific and Canada. They found that those conceived using ART were shorter, lighter and thinner from infancy to early adolescence compared with naturally conceived individuals. However, these differences were not only small across all ages, they also disappeared as the offspring grew older.

“Parents and their children conceived by ART can be reassured that this might mean they are a little bit smaller and lighter from infancy to adolescence, but these differences are unlikely to have any health implications,” explains Dr Elhakeem. “We acknowledge it is important that as more people conceived by ART become adults, we continue to explore any potential health risks at older age.”

Study senior author Prof. Deborah Lawlor, also of the University of Bristol, comments: “This important research is only possible through large scale international collaboration and longitudinal health studies, where participants contribute health data throughout their entire lives. We are particularly grateful to the European Research Council and Horizon 2020 for making this possible and to all of the study participants and researchers.”

The study supported by ART-HEALTH (Conception by artificial reproductive technologies and offspring health) and LIFECYCLE (Early-life stressors and LifeCycle health) has been published in ‘JAMA Network Open’. This research has laid the groundwork for studies with larger samples at older ages.

For more information, please see:

ART-HEALTH project

LIFECYCLE project website