Since the dawn of assisted reproduction in the late 1970’s the question of whether those conceived through “artificial means” would be as smart and healthy as those conceived naturally was debated.
Here’s the latest answer: Children conceived artificially don’t have worse cognitive skills than babies conceived naturally. In fact, kids born through techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), had better scores on reading and verbal tests, according to a new study.
Despite some prior research suggesting in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) can harm a child’s cognitive ability, researchers at the University of Oxford found otherwise. They also found that parents who undergo IVF and ICSI are typically older, more educated, and have a higher income than parents who had naturally conceived children.
In the study, published in the journal Human Reproduction, Mills and colleagues looked at data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which continues to follow the lives of more than 18,500 children born in the U.K. in 2000 and 2001. Children were given cognitive ability tests at various points in their lives from ages 3 to 11 years, which assessed vocabulary skills, reading, and use of verbs. The final sample of artificially conceived children in Mills’ study included 125 born through IVF and 61 conceived through ICSI. The test scores of the children born through ART were compared to children who were conceived naturally.
Analyses revealed that ART didn’t impair a child’s higher thinking skills. At age 3 and 5 years, children conceived with the aid of ART had higher scores on verbal cognitive tests. Over time, this decreased and leveled off by age 11. Once the children reach 11 years old, the role of the parents is especially important for cognitive development, the authors note in their paper.
This study is very reassuring that patients need not worry that the fertility procedure in itself will adversely affect their child.