‘Test Tube Babies’ at High Risk
Reported February 23, 2010
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — More than 3 million children have been born as a result of assisted reproductive technologies since the 1978 birth of the first “test tube baby.” While the majority of these children are healthy and normal, as a group they are at greater risk of certain kinds of birth defects and being low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life.
Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine, studied the impact of the environment on genes by comparing one type of chromosome modification, called “DNA methylation,” between children conceived in the traditional fashion and children born as a result of assisted reproduction.
“We found that 5 to10 percent of these chromosome modifications were different in children born through assisted reproduction, and this altered the expression of nearby genes,” Sapienza was quoted as saying. “But we have not yet distinguished whether this is caused by assisted reproductive technologies or other factors such as the couple’s infertility.”
Because some of the affected genes are involved in the development of fat tissue and the metabolism of glucose, Sapienza said she believes it will be important to monitor these children long-term to determine whether they have higher rates of obesity or diabetes.
He noted that even though there were measurable differences in DNA methylation and gene expression between the two groups, only a small fraction of the assisted reproduction children were found to be outside the “normal” range.
SOURCE: Presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, San Diego, February 19, 2010