Aggressive IVF treatments at clinics in the UK are putting women and babies at risk, experts say.

Aggressive IVF treatments at clinics in the UK are putting women and babies at risk, experts say. Unnecessary procedures, high doses of potent drugs and risky interventions are being used as couples spend a fortune trying to conceive. According to experts, a safer and milder approach to IVF is available that could give patients equivalent success rates over a longer period and at a lower cost. 

Professor Geeta Nargund, of St George’s Hospital in south London, expressed her concerns at a conference in Copenhagen. She said there was mounting evidence that the usual method of IVF used in the UK, in which ovaries are stimulated with high doses of drugs to produce large quantities of eggs for harvesting, was harmful to women’s health and caused chromosomal abnormalities to resulting embryos. “High-dose stimulation can have distressing side effects on the woman, the most serious of which is called ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome,” she said. “There is no doubt that women subjected to this kind of stimulation are at serious health risk.” ~ London Telegraph, May 14

Aggressive IVF puts women and babies at risk, experts say
Jared Yee
Creative commons
IVF
UK