Do Infertility Treatments Cause Developmental Delays in Children?

Researchers studied assessment scores of 1,800 children born to women who became pregnant after receiving infertility treatments.

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics points to findings that infertility treatments do not appear to contribute to developmental delays in children. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the New York State Department of Health and other institutions studied the developmental assessment scores of 1,800 children born to women who became pregnant after receiving infertility treatment and those of more than 4,000 children born to women who did not receive such treatment and found no differences between the two groups.

“When we began our study, there was little research on the potential effects of conception via fertility treatments on U.S. children,” says Edwina Yeung, Ph.D., an investigator in the Division of Intramural Population Health Research at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). “Our results provide reassurance to the thousands of couples who have relied on these treatments to establish their families.”

Because some forms of developmental disability are not diagnosed until after age 3, the authors will continue to evaluate the children in the study until they reach 8 years of age.