But the point is not in the procedure itself, but in what kind of “inheritance” parents reward the kids.
No, this news is not one of those when officials give out some hellishly illiterate and heartless judgment about methods of treating infertility – like saying that you cannot give birth to a healthy child through IVF. This is just a dispassionate statistic, just a study by scientists at the University of Michigan.
For ten years, experts have followed 276 thousand children conceived by in vitro fertilization. They also focused on an additional 2,2 million naturally born babies. Scientists tracked how children are developing, how they get sick, how they feel. And it turned out that the risk of getting cancer in babies conceived with the help of IVF technology was 17 percent higher than that of “natural scientists”. However, you should not rush to sign the petition to ban IVF. It’s not about technology, it’s about the health of the parents.
A team of scientists led by Dr. Logan Spector is trying to dot the i’s once and for all – whether the IVF technology somehow affects the health of the unborn baby or not. After all, there were studies that argued that such children are more susceptible to diseases of the cardiovascular system. But there is no specific data in these studies. But real science should still operate with statistics, not pure theory.
“We found little link between IVF and childhood cancers. But they did not find any connection between methods of treating infertility with the development of tumors. The only type of cancer that we have seen is liver tumors, which arise due to heredity, due to health problems in the parents, which caused their infertility, ”says Dr. Spector.
Now doctors will work on the study further – after all, IVF technology, like any other, can be improved. Even now, in our clinics, it is possible to exclude the risk of developing certain hereditary diseases in an unborn child. Moreover, for couples with a history of genetic diseases, IVF is the only chance to conceive and give birth to a healthy baby.