No increased risk of cardiovascular disease among women who have used IVF treatment
Research findings
|Published
Women who have used in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment to conceive have no increased risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a new Nordic study including more than two million women who had delivered in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
More and more couples are using IVF treatment to start a family. As part of the treatment, women are given follicle-stimulating hormones. Little is still known about how the treatment affects the health of the women and any children who are conceived.
“In particular, questions have been raised as to whether women who use IVF may have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and we wanted to investigate this further,” says Maria C. Magnus, senior researcher at the Centre for Fertility and Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
The study included 2,496,441 women who gave birth in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. On average, the women were followed for approximately 11 years.
The findings suggest that women who gave birth after using IVF had a 3 percent lower risk for all cardiovascular diseases compared to women who gave birth without IVF. The findings also showed no increased risk of specific types of cardiovascular disease, such as heart attack, stroke, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, or heart failure.
“These findings are reassuring for women who have conceived using IVF treatment,” confirms Magnus.
Different types of IVF treatment
The researchers also studied whether the risk of cardiovascular disease varied with the type of IVF treatment.
Some types of IVF treatment use an embryo that has been frozen, and some use microinjection of a sperm cell into the egg cell, while others do not. The findings in the study showed no differences in the risk of cardiovascular disease when using microinjection. However, there was an indication of an increased risk of stroke among women who had had a frozen embryo transferred, while there was no increased risk for the other subgroups of cardiovascular disease. Women who had only had a fresh embryo transferred had no increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The researchers behind the study would like to see more long-term studies.
“We need further studies of the different types of IVF treatment with a longer follow-up time,” says Magnus.
About the study and limitations to the study
The study used a register coupling with data from several of the central health registries in the Nordic countries to study the association between the use of IVF and the risk of cardiovascular disease among women.
“To be able to study a large enough group of women who had given birth after IVF treatment, we had to combine data from all the Nordic countries” explains Magnus.
The study is part of a larger project funded by the European Research Council which is working to uncover the association between infertility and the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The study has some limitations. The follow-up period was short, and most of the women were still middle-aged at the end of the study. It was also not possible to determine whether the need for IVF treatment was due to female or male infertility, or why the fertility problems arose. More studies are therefore needed to better understand how underlying causes of fertility problems can affect the risk of cardiovascular disease among women who use IVF treatment.
The study only included women who have given birth, so the researchers could not study women who did not conceive, or who experienced a miscarriage after IVF treatment. The researchers therefore believe that more studies are needed.
“We want to carry out more studies to look more closely to see whether the risk of cardiovascular disease depends on the number IVF treatments undergone by a woman, as well as their outcome. This will help to uncover whether there could be particular groups at increased risk which should monitor with respect to their cardiovascular health,” concludes Magnus.
Read more
Read the full article in the journal JAMA Cardiology
