Zafer Atayurt: A New and Broader Perspective on the Long-Term Safety of ICSI
Zafer Atayurt, IVF Laboratory Director at Ventus IVF Center, shared on LinkedIn about a paper by Thy Phuong Anh Le et al. published in RBMO:
“A new and broader perspective on the long-standing debate!
The newly published study below is a comprehensive meta-analysis of 94 real-world studies and provides broadly reassuring evidence. Most long-term health and developmental outcomes following ICSI were comparable with those observed after conventional IVF.
Although small increases were reported for certain health outcomes, their absolute prevalence remained very low.
Even these findings, however, are subject to an important potential bias: ICSI has historically been used predominantly in cases of male factor infertility.
The effects of the procedure itself therefore cannot be reliably separated from those of impaired sperm quality, parental genetic factors and the underlying causes of infertility.
In this context, sibling oocyte studies provide an especially valuable comparison because they largely control for parental and oocyte-related factors.
These studies have generally shown similar implantation, pregnancy, and live birth potential for embryos produced by cIVF and ICSI. However, to my knowledge, no sibling oocyte study has compared the long-term health and developmental outcomes of the resulting children.
Taken together, the available evidence supports ICSI as a generally safe fertilization method. It does not demonstrate that routine ICSI improves live birth outcomes in every patient, but neither does it establish that ICSI must be restricted exclusively to specific indications.
Therefore, I believe the discussion surrounding routine ICSI should focus more on ensuring robust quality control of the procedure and on whether charging patients an additional fee for it is justified.”
Title: Health and development of children conceived using assisted reproductive technology: a meta-analysis of real-world data
Authors: Thy Phuong Anh Le, El-Wui Loh, Ting-Jung Lai, Ka-Wai Tam
You can read the Full Article in Reproductive BioMedicine Online.
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