Kids
conceived through IVF are said to be academically bright
According
to a new study, children conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF)
outperform their age- and gender-matched classmates on academic assessments.
Our
findings reassure clinicians and patients by indicating that being conceived
through IVF has no negative impact on a child's IQ or cognitive development.
Van
Voorhis compared the academic achievement of 423 Iowa children, ages 8 to 17,
who were conceived through IVF at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
to 372 age- and gender-matched peers from the same Iowa schools.
Researchers
also looked into whether different qualities of the children, parents or IVF
methods had an impact on the test results of the offspring.
The
study discovered that children conceived through IVF outperformed their peers
on standardised tests and that a number of factors were associated with higher
test scores, including the mother's age, both parents' educational levels, and
reduced divorce rates.
Importantly,
the study found that varied IVF processes, such as using fresh vs frozen
embryos, and different insemination methods had no effect on the test scores of
offspring.
Although
the study was unable to fully explain why IVF-conceived children outperformed
their contemporaries, Van Voorhis speculates that IVF-conceived children's
parents are older and have a greater degree of education than the general
population.
We
attempted to adjust for any socioeconomic or environmental differences between
the children born through IVF and their peers by utilising age- and
gender-matched children from the same classrooms as a control group to compare
to our study participants.
However,
we couldn't rule out the possibility that there were some differences between
the IVF children and the controls that we couldn't find in our data.
The
researchers discovered a potentially worrying tendency toward lower test scores
for multiple births among infants delivered by IVF—single babies fared better
than twins, who performed better than triplets.
However,
this trend was not statistically significant, and the triplets still
outperformed non-IVF children on average.
This
tendency supports our belief that singleton births are healthier than multiple
births, but further research is needed to determine whether this trend is real.
IVF is usually thought to be safe, but because the technology has only been around for 30 years, there is little information on the long-term health effects of children conceived this way.