Nearly three out of four couples that begin fertility treatment will eventually become parents, long-term studies suggest. The analysis of nearly 20,000 Danish couples found 65% had children within three years and 71% within five years. Doctors, presenting their data at a fertility conference, said the odds were heavily influenced by age. But experts said
Read more
Many ultraviolet (UV)-filtering chemicals commonly used in sunscreens interfere with the function of human sperm cells, and some mimic the effect of the female hormone progesterone, a new study finds. Results of the Danish study will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society’s 98th annual meeting in Boston. “These results are of concern and might
Read more
Portugal’s president has just vetoed a law authorizing surrogacy on June 7, 2016. The law modifying the conditions for recourse to medically assisted procreation (MAP) was passed in parliament last May 13th by a slim majority. The new law extends MAP to single women and to lesbian couples, without any stipulations for medical indications. It
Read more
The editor-in-chief of one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals has attacked the rising use of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) for the treatment of infertility, following publication of the latest world report on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) [1] today (Saturday). The report in Human Reproduction shows that while ICSI use has levelled off in
Read more
A woman in the USA who acted as a surrogate for a single man, and gave birth to triplets, has taken her claim for custody of at least one of the children to an appeals court. Melissa Cook agreed to act as a surrogate for the man, known as CM, in 2015 using his sperm
Read more
A rare genetic mutation reduces the risk of having a heart attack by one-third, a study has found. The mutation, which substantially lowers levels of non-HDL cholesterol – a marker for heart-disease risk – is already being investigated as potential drug target for preventing heart disease. ‘[This is] an important and previously unknown mechanism for modulating
Read more
One of the largest-ever genetics studies in the social sciences has found 74 genetic variants that are associated with the amount of time an individual spends in education. However, the researchers estimate that the variants they identified comprise just 0.43 percent of the variation in length of time spent studying across individuals. In other words,
Read more
Daljinder Kaur, a 70-year old Indian woman, has just given birth to her first child who was conceived in-vitro by IVF with egg donation from a fertility clinic. The mother purportedly declared: « When we saw the IVF advert, we thought we should also give it a try as I badly wanted to have a
Read more
