No higher risk of pregnancy complications for women who were conceived using assisted fertilisation

“The main finding from the study is good news for those who were conceived using assisted reproductive technologies. They do not have more complications in their pregnancies compared to the control group,” Ellen Øen Carlsen says.

She is a PhD student at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and is the first author of the study which has recently been published in the international journal BMJ Medicine.

First study in the world

It may seem that parents who have been conceived using assisted fertilisation themselves have children later in life. But there was no difference when it came to birth weight, duration of pregnancy or risk of, amongst other things, pre-eclampsia or having to undergo a caesarean section.

Since the number of pregnancies in this group is still low, there is some uncertainty related to the results.

The first child conceived using assisted fertilisation in Norway was born in 1984, and a total of over 50,000 children have now been born using these methods in this country.

This is the first study in the world to examine the pregnancies of those who were conceived using assisted fertilisation.

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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik.

Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no

Reference:

Carlsen et al. Reproductive outcomes in women and men conceived by assisted reproductive technologies in Norway: prospective registry based study, BMJ Medicine, vol. 2, 2023. DOI: 10.1136/bmjmed-2022-000318

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