Could Fertility Treatments Raise Risks For Mothers Delivering Their Baby?

Fertility Treatments like Artificial Reproductive Technology (ART) and In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) could cause high risk on mother's health. The analysis was led by Candice Belanoff, an SPH clinical assistant.

The research was published on BU Today and according to their lengthy explanation as to why this is so, ART has been linked to risk factors such as delivery complications that could involve the placenta and caesarian delivery.

The study they conducted had been controlled for, age, race ethnicity and education. They also tried to see all other risk factors that could affect a mother's health.

Regarding their study, Belanoff says: "I don't want to overstate the risk associated with ART, but it was significantly different from both women who had subfertility and women who had no indication of subfertility whatsoever." She added, "We know women who use ART to conceive are more likely to have underlying health and fertility problems that necessitated the use of ART, but we need more research to understand what factors are putting them more at risk during delivery."

Belanoff also emphasized that even if the risk are high when it comes to ART, there is still a very low known maternal risk involved. Further in their study, it was found out that women who used ART had 1.75 times high odd health complications compared to women who are sub-fertile. As for those who delivered vaginally, it was a 1.97 times higher than sub-fertile woman, but 2.27 times higher odds to women who are fertile.

As for those who delivered twins, the only significant complications for an ART mother is that they have to undergo caesarian delivery. The morbidity is greater as compared to fertile mothers. It was also, reported that in 2001 - 2011, the percentage of babies born using ART rose from 0.9 to 1.15 percent.

 Massachusetts Outcomes Study of Assisted Reproductive Technology (MOSART), did a number of studies in order to find out the risk in ART procedures in women. In which according to Belanoff, compare the two cases by separating groups of women who  get fertile the natural way and compare them to both IVF pregnancies and fully fertile pregnancies, "we were really able to tease out the confounding effects of underlying health issues and subfertility," she says.