Long-Term Health Effects of Fertility Medication

Are there long-term health effects of fertility medications, or gonadotropins, which are natural hormones normally produced by the body? When you go through menopause, the blood levels of all of these hormones are going to be far higher than anything that can be attained by injecting fertility medication. However, when given to women of reproductive age, whose ovaries can and do respond, they are powerful stuff.

Anyone who takes them through even one cycle can attest to the physical and emotional effects of having one’s hormones surging at a much higher level than nature ever intended. Do people suffer long-term effects 2 or 20 years down the road? No one knows for sure, but here are the most recent conclusions on the safety of taking gonadotropins.

Effects on the mother

At this time, experts have no solid proof that taking gonadotropins has any long-term effect on women. Some studies have shown a possible link between fertility medications and ovarian cancer, but other studies have not supported these findings. The actual risk to the mother is short-term hyperstimulation, which occurs in about 1.5 percent of IVF cycles and occurs so severely that the mother needs to be admitted to a hospital 0.34 percent of IVF stimulation cycles. Infection, significant bleeding, and anesthetic complications occurred in less than 0.1 percent of the cycles. From 2000 to 2011, there were no maternal deaths due to IVF.

One thing most studies have agreed upon is that the risk of ovarian cancer is higher in all women who’ve never become pregnant, regardless of whether or not they’ve taken fertility medications. So, if you’ve taken fertility drugs for any amount of time and never had a child, make sure to consult your gynecologist. Like many things, the recommendations about frequency of visits and what testing to do changes constantly as more is learned about heritability of disease. Your healthcare can be tailored to meet your set of circumstances, and thus global recommendations may not be appropriate for you. Only a close working relationship with your healthcare provider can make sure you have the optimal healthcare.

Effects on the baby

No one is sure whether ART procedures will have a long-term effect on the children conceived through their use — the children born through high-tech methods such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) aren’t old enough yet. The oldest IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. So, is there something that will show up when the IVF conceived children reach 60, or 80, or 100? Techniques such as ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) and assisted hatching are even newer; they’ve only been used extensively since the 1990s.

Because research is ongoing even as children are being born, high-tech treatment has an element of risk simply because the jury’s still out on long-term effects. Given the limitation data, what do we know about those people who have been conceived through IVF? Trying to accurately determine if IVF is harmful to the children it creates is difficult. One complication is trying to understand whether any harm is due to the diagnosis of infertility itself or is related to the procedure of IVF. Most authors of the studies evaluating the effect of IVF suggest that some of the risk is due to the diagnosis of infertility. Some studies have suggested that high-tech babies have lower birth weight (33 grams [1.16 ounces> lighter) and earlier delivery (by half a day). A 2016 study concluded that many obstetric and neonatal risks were elevated in singleton IVF pregnancies, including such things as birth defects and neonatal death. While the increased risks were real, the actual chance of one of these risks is low because these complications occur infrequently (8.3 percent prevalence in IVF babies as opposed to 5.8 percent prevalence in spontaneously conceived babies).

More twins and triplets are born to moms using fertility meds, and multiples more commonly have low birth weight and developmental delays. Also, more babies are born to older mothers through high-tech treatment, and older women tend to have more complicated pregnancies than women under age 35.

It‘s important to note that up to this point, no effect of fertility medications themselves on the babies has been shown. Furthermore, fertility medications are natural hormones, normally present in the body. And even though they may be present at higher than normal values during the stimulation phase, they’re all well out of your system by the time the embryo implants. So whatever effect these medications may have would have to be on the egg, and these effects are purely hypothetical. Still, only time will tell for sure.