One of the wonderful things about the modern age is that people can have children much later in life and things like poor levels of fertility need no longer constrain your likelihood of conceiving. The joy of raising children is open to anyone willing to make the commitment, be it a financial one or simply a chronological one. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is one of the more common forms of specialist fertilisation and is a kind of assisted reproductive technology otherwise known as ART.
As you can imagine, being able to have a baby means the absolute world to some people. Being able to make that happen is a fantastic thing and is genuinely one of the more profound and fantastic things which modern medicine has accomplished (in this humble writers opinion of course). It’s not an old treatment and as such, kids who were brought into the world using ART are only now growing up.
In a recent study, something rather worrying come to the attention of researchers at the Universities of Essex and Oxford in the UK. It seems that kids who are the result of IVF and other ART treatments are as much as four times as likely to develop asthma or other respiratory conditions as kids who were conceived naturally.
This new finding has raised a large red flag over all ART treatments as being potentially dangerous and now studies will have to be made into finding just why this occurs and whether there’s anything which doctors can do to remove this likelihood or at least lessen it!
Of course, when you consider than these children wouldn’t be alive without an ART treatment, what’s a case of asthma? They’re alive, they’ve got parents who love them and did everything in their power to have them. A lot of naturally born children aren’t nearly as lucky.
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