IVF risks

If you'd read some of the newspaper headlines about IVF this morning, you could be forgiven for getting into a bit of a panic. It sounded as if going through IVF put you at a hugely increased risk of having a baby with Down's syndrome, and that it was the drugs used during fertility treatment which caused the problem.

This research is undeniably interesting, but it's far from conclusive. The eggs of just 34 couples were examined, far too few to be truly representative, and the reason for the problems they found is not clear either. They saw that when older women took higher doses of fertility drugs during treatment, there were abnormalities in the eggs which were produced. These abnormalities appear to be different from the more common problems which occur in older women's eggs anyway.

There are a number of things that need to be understood about this. The eggs studied were far more likely to lead to an unsuccessful treatment cycle or a miscarriage than to a baby with serious problems. The researchers have suggested that ovarian stimulation could disturb the normal process of egg production, but it is also not clear whether the fertility drugs caused problems for the eggs or whether the treatment allowed eggs to be produced from the ovaries which might otherwise never have got as far as being released.

So, we would like to see more research in this field to discover whether pushing older women's ovaries to produce more eggs actually only results in larger numbers of poor quality eggs - but in the meantime you can find out more about the research at www.eshre.eu