Photosales
niJobfinder
niCarfinder
Home Delivery
Propertynews
Study finds risk in IVF screening test
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
A is for alcohol
Good for: moderate drinking is good for the heart, though the effect is chiefly seen in middle-aged men - two or three alcoholic drinks a day cuts the risk of heart attack by at least 30 per cent.
Bad for: drinking to excess, liver disease, dependency - all are rising. Other effects are less obvious: one drink a day increases a woman's risk of all types of cancer by six per cent. This week, scientists from Harvard Medical School presented findings showing couples having IVF who drank one bottle of wine a week cut their chances of a live birth by a quarter.
enlargeScreening IVF embryos for genetic defects increases the death risk of multiple birth babies five times, a study has found.
But the procedure, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), appears to be harmless for singletons.
PGD involves removing one or two cells from an embryo to test it for abnormalities and diseases.
There have been concerns the test might itself adversely affect babies created through In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF).
The largest and longest running study of children born after PGD suggests that such fears are unfounded, for singletons at least. However researchers found in the case of multiple pregnancies, PGD increased the risk of death around the time of birth five-fold.
The findings were published yesterday in the journal Human Reproduction.
- Text Size
