"We're finally using IVF to get pregnant. And we're very excited, but a little scared. Is it a fact that babies born after IVF aren't all different in any ways from children born after natural trying-to-conceive efforts?"
Dr. Sonja Kristiansen, Medical Director of Houston Fertility Center responds:
As the mother of two kids, myself, I really understand my patients' worries about whether their children will be impacted by the fertility treatment that helped bring them about. Fortunately, I'm glad to be able to point them to statistics based on long-term studies, now that IVF's been used successfully for several decades.
The first thing fertility patients need to know is that problems may be associated with multiple pregnancies, whether those occur from fertility treatment or not. As I wrote in a 2005 newsletter article, "In all, most concerns about the kids of ART are related to whether or not the children are singletons or multiples." I refer to a patient fact sheet by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine called "Complications and Problems associated with Multiple Births". We make our protocol judgements with very careful consideration of each patient's diagnosis and treatment need in order to avoid multiple pregnancies.
A recent brochure published by an Australian reproductive medicine authority offers some more information on risks for everyone involved in ART -- men, women, and babies -- see Putting the Risks of IVF in Patients' Hands. But you should keep in mind the information is based only on data from Australian fertility patients and their children.
In this 2008 review of studies on the development of children after ART, the researchers concluded that main points to know include:
prematurity and low birth weight are the primary risk factors contributing to poor outcomes in ART offspring
parental characteristics inherent in many (but not all) fertility patients as a group may include mothers or fathers who are already at greater risk, with or without fertility treatment, for offspring born with developmental problems
"IVF babies" overall are more likely to be born prematurely and of lower birth weight than naturally-conceived children (and this may be related to my second point above)
Children of ART are more thoroughly examined as a group than are naturally-conceived babies, so a kind of "hypervigilance" may skew observational research data
and most importantly:
"Large-scale, well-designed studies have found most children born after ART to be healthy, typically developing young children."
~ Dr. Sonja Kristiansen MD
