Babies Conceived With Fertility Treatment Have More Birth Defects

Boston (dbTechno) - According to a new study released on Monday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), babies who are conceived via assisted reproductive technology (ART) are more likely to have birth defects than babies conceived naturally.

For the study, researchers compared data from 281 babies who were conceived with the use of ART, and 14,095 babies conceived naturally.

Among those which resulted in just a single birth, the babies conceived with the fertility treatment were twice as likely to have birth defects which included heart defects, cleft lip, and gastrointestinal defects.

The overall risk of the birth defects taking place is still very low.

For example, the risk for many of these birth defects is around 1 in every 1,000 births when conceived naturally.  This would mean a baby conceived via fertility treatment would be at a rate of 1 in every 500 or so births.

One interesting thing researchers found in the study is that ART did not significantly increase the risk of birth defects for multiple births.

This comes despite the fact that the fertility technique actually increases the chance of having twins.

More research is likely going to be carried out to see the overall risks and why the babies conceived with fertility treatment are more likely to have the defects.

The study has been published in the journal Human Reproduction.