IVF conceived Babies don’t develop differently – Study

A new study has confirmed that children born via In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) do not develop differently compared to children conceived naturally.

IVF, according to experts, is a method of assisted reproduction in which a man’s sperm and a woman’s eggs are combined outside of the body in a laboratory dish.

One or more fertilised eggs could then be transferred into the woman’s uterus, where they may implant in the uterine lining and develop.

The research was carried out by fertility researchers at the University of Bristol and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, JAMA Network Open.

Speaking on the recently published study, the lead researcher, Dr. Ahmed Elhakeem, said concerns have been raised about the risks of children conceived via IVF, but noted that “Parents and their children 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.”

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The researchers, according to a recently published report, said the findings suggest that parents conceiving or hoping to conceive through assisted reproductive technology and their offspring should be reassured that differences in early life growth and adiposity are small and no longer apparent by late adolescence.

To conduct the study, they looked at the height, weight and BMI data of children born via natural conception or assisted reproductive technology at different ages.

It tracked more than 156,000 infants, children, adolescents, and young adults across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Canada.

The research, which included people born between 1984 to 2018, found that “those conceived using assisted reproductive technology (in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, plus embryo transfers) were shorter, lighter, and thinner by most estimates from infancy up to early adolescence compared with their naturally conceived peers; however, the differences were small across all ages and reduced with older age.”

In addition, statistical analysis showed children aged less than three months old were around 0.27cm shorter, on average than those born via natural conception.

But as they got older, the difference got smaller, with naturally-conceived children only 0.06cm taller by the time they were 17, on average.

As reported by Daily Mail UK, in the same way, such similarity was noted in the area of weight as babies born via artificial methods were born 0.27kg lighter than their counterparts conceived via natural birth.