Assisted Reproductive Technology and Infertility | Karolinska Institutet news

picture:

By linking data from several Swedish registries you can Chen Wang Performed follow-ups of prospectively recorded data with a sufficiently long follow-up time, taking into account a number of basic characteristics of the parents, which reduced the risk of selection bias in the study.

Focusing on the long-term safety of children conceived with ART where knowledge is limited by previous few or poor studies, Chen investigated ADHD and school performance in the first study, and depression, anxiety, antidepressant use, and suicidal behavior in the study. Second, and finally childhood asthma in the third study. The specific goal of the studies was to distinguish between how latent infertility and other characteristics of the parents affected them. In the fourth study, Chen then focused on trying to predict pregnancy complications in women on ART, developing predictive models for pre-eclampsia, placental complications, and postpartum hemorrhage.

What are the main findings of your thesis?

Most important are the reassuring results regarding the long-term health of children born after ART, as we found no cause for concern in terms of school performance, risk of ADHD, and mental health. As a group, children born after ART were more likely to have early childhood asthma and obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescence, but this was mainly explained by differences in parental characteristics related to primary infertility.

Why did you choose to research this particular topic?

– After my master’s education, I was interested in both registry-based studies and epidemiological methods, and my supervisor introduced me to this area of ​​research, which is very interesting and increasingly relevant. ART has been used in more than 10 million births over the past 45 years and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. Studies on long-term health remain relatively limited but are of increasing importance given the number of children born with ART who reach adolescence and adulthood. Increasing.

How do you think research should continue in the future in this field?

I believe that national records-based studies remain the key to assessing the long-term safety of ART because they provide comprehensive and reliable information at the population level on both ART use and different clinical outcomes. My work shows the importance of taking into account the basic characteristics of parents, which I hope future studies will take into account. For clinical practice, we also need more information about the safety of specific procedures commonly used, which are also somewhat comparable in randomized clinical trials.

hypothesis

“Registration-based infertility studies and the use of assisted reproductive technologies: possibilities and challenges.“

Chen Wang. Karolinska Institutet (2022), ISBN: 978-91-8016-728-4