Children of Ivf Often Ill Early on: Study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Long-term rates of illness appear to be higher among children conceived after in vitro fertilization (IVF) than for other children, Swedish researchers report. However, this might be influenced by parents of such children being more likely to seek medical advice.

"An increased morbidity in IVF children exists at least for the first few years of life," Dr. Bengt Kallen from the University of Lund told Reuters Health. This is partly due to singleton infants born prematurely but also to a large extent to multiple births, the researcher said.

Kallen and colleagues analyzed hospitalizations and cancer occurrences in more than 16,000 children born after IVF during a follow-up period of 1 to 20 years.

According to their report in the journal Fertility and Sterility, IVF children were nearly twice as likely as other children to require hospitalization during a median observation period of 5.5 years. The hospitalization risk was higher among children born in multiple births than in singleton children.

Except for upper respiratory tract infections, convulsions, congenital malformations, and accidents, the elevated risks were no longer significant after exclusion of preterm births, the researchers note.

For the most part, the risk of cancer was not elevated in IVF children.

After the age of 6, however, there was no detectable increase in risk of hospitalization among IVF children.

It could be, the investigators suggest, that parents of IVF children "might be more prone to seek medical advice when their children are sick compared with parents of naturally conceived children."

SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, September 2005.