A study recently published by the European Heart Journal suggests that children conceived using in vitro fertilization (IVF) have an increased risk of congenital heart defects. As reported by The New York Times, researchers tracked the health of children born through IVF in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland between 1985 and 2014. In examining the medical records of over seven million Nordic children, they discovered evidence that IVF poses a risk to the children’s heart health.
The study, entitled “Congenital heart defects in children born after assisted reproductive technology: a CoNARTaS study,” began with the premise that “Children born after assisted reproductive technology (ART) have worse perinatal outcomes compared with spontaneously conceived children.” The researchers went on to investigate whether children conceived through IVF have a higher risk of congenital heart defects, defined in the study as “structural anomalies of the heart and intrathoracic vessels during pregnancy and birth,” as compared with children who were conceived naturally.
Researchers cross-linked data from national ART registries, medical birth registries (MBRs), national patient registries (NPRs), cause of death registries, and birth registries from the four countries, examining data of all the countries’ live-born children, and the birth years of the children generally spanned from 1984-2015.
Out of the 7,747,637 children studied, 171,735 were conceived with ART. Researchers studied the health outcomes of children conceived with ART who were implanted in the womb after being frozen at the embryo stage, as well as children who were implanted in the womb without previously having been frozen. No link was found between congenital heart defects and the fact that some of the children conceived with IVF were frozen as embryos. […]
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