"Fertility Tourism" Carries Health Risks

Women who go to overseas fertility clinics run the risk of higher-than-average multiple pregnancies, which can dramatically increase the chances of high blood pressure, hospital stays, premature labor, fetal disabilities and even death in mother or babies. A study done on 109 British women with multiple pregnancies showed that 15 were conceived naturally and, of the 94 remaining, 25 percent had received fertility treatment outside of Britain - so-called fertility tourism.

- "Fertility Tourism" Carries Health Risks video

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In Vitro Fertilization Improves

Clinical results from Down Under suggest that recent advances in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) can double the chances of having a baby for women in their early 40s. And the success rate for this group is increasing faster than any other's. The successes resulted from improved media for culturing embryos and a better technique for selecting those with the best chances for developing in a healthy manner, said Peter Illingworth, president of the Fertility Society of Australia. The new procedure involved transferring embryos into recipient women at the blastocyst stage (five or six days after fertilization), rather than at the cleavage stage (two to three days after). This allowed doctors to better assess which embryos had the best survival chances.

- In Vitro Fertilization Improves video

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Protein Boosts Sex Hormones, Suggesting Infertility Therapy

Giving a special hormone to infertile women can dramatically increase their production of sex hormones, which may lead to a new infertility treatment for women with low sex hormone levels, a recent study demonstrated.
    
The work, which was led by Waljit Dhillo of the Department of Investigative Medicine at Imperial College London, was presented at a meeting of the Society for Endocrinology BES.

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Fertility Drugs Raise Cancer Risk

Taking medications to enhance fertility appears to increase the chance of developing uterine cancer in particular, as well as some other forms of the disease, according to a very large, long, recently completed study. Drugs that stimulate ovulation have been used for more than three decades to help women who have difficulty conceiving, who are undergoing in vitro fertilization, or who are donating or selling their eggs. But the drugs’ effect on health has never been clarified.

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Discovery Links Pre-Eclampsia to Diet

Women with the condition pre-eclampsia have been found with red blood cells containing unusually high levels of a compound found in unpasteurized food, according to research published in the journal Reproductive Sciences. The findings are important because they hint at the possibility of this compound, known as "ergothioneine", being an indicator of pre-eclampsia. Further down the line, researchers hope the compound will help them understand the currently unknown cause of the condition.
(Read more about Discovery Links Pre-Eclampsia to Diet)

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Using Frozen Embryos Increases Pregnancy Chances

The regular use of carefully chosen frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments dramatically increases the pregnancy success rate among infertile couples, a British clinic has found.
    
The new regimen holds the promise of sharply reducing the time a couple has to wait for a baby, and of alleviating the risk to women of repeated cycles of side-effect-ridden fertility drugs, which can lead to polycystic ovary syndrome.

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Unicellular Test Lets Doctors Weed Out Mutated Embryos

A technique that allows doctors to find dangerous "microdeletions" in human embryo chromosomes can be used to reject embryos prone to developing cancer and other diseases in later life and to implant only healthy embryos, according to a recent study. Up till now, gene assays could detect only pinpoint mutations, but the new technique allows for finding much larger chromosomal flaws and deletions. (Read more about Unicellular Test Lets Doctors Weed Out Mutated Embryos)

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Obesity Gene Also Codes for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

The gene that codes for susceptibility to obesity also predisposes a woman to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a common cause of infertility, a recent study discovered.
   
The study, done by Tom Barber and his colleagues from the Oxford Center for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, of the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, was presented at the annual Society for Endocrinology BES meeting in Britain.

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Scientists Clone Vital Sperm Protein

A protein vital for male fertility has been cloned, produced and purified, a recent study reported. The findings may open up new pathways in male fertility treatment and methods of male contraception.
   
The study, published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, recounted how researchers identified the binder of sperm protein (BSP), which is essential for sperm maturation, and then used genetic engineering techniques to produce it in significant quantities.

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Infertility Treatment Jeopardize Pregnant Women's Health

Having three or more miscarriages and undergoing hormone treatment for infertility increase pregnant women’s risk for pre-eclampsia, a condition of high blood pressure during pregnancy, a recent investigation shows.

In the study, which was published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health examined data on over 20,000 first-time mothers from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. Their baseline for normalcy was the pre-eclampsia rate among first-time mothers who had never miscarried nor undergone fertility treatment, which was 5.2 percent.

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