from PART III - ASSISTED REPRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
SAFETY OF ART
Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are increasingly used worldwide to overcome infertility problems, and it has been estimated that more than one million children have been born relying on these techniques. ART births now account for 1–3 percent of all births in developed countries. ART have considerably evolved since the beginning, and now they include controlled ovarian stimulation, (immature) gamete retrieval and manipulation, standard in vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), (extended) embryo culture, freezing/thawing of embryos, embryo biopsy in cases of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and more recently in vitro maturation of oocytes and techniques of cryopreservation of testicular/ovarian tissues. There has been concern about the health of the children conceived ever since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978 (1) and certainly after the introduction of the more invasive ICSI procedure in the early 1990s. The safety aspect has been addressed in various epidemiological studies of children conceived by ART as well as experimental studies. The follow-up studies including a review by Rizk et al. of the major congenital anomalies in the first 1,000 babies conceived by IVF have shown that generally ART-conceived children are as healthy as naturally conceived children (1), except that ART may increase the risk of a few outcomes. There is accumulating evidence of an increase in chromosomal abnormalities in ICSI children, as well as evidence for an increase in malformation rate and in the number of singleton children with a low birth weight in the IVF/ICSI population compared to the general population.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.