Children born from frozen embryos weigh more and do better than those born after fres...(birth weight FER children significantly ...)

"Additionally there were significantly fewer children admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit in the FER group," said Dr. Pinborg, "although, when limited to single births, this difference disappeared. Most encouragingly, we found no increased risk of congenital malformations in the FER group; the rate in this group was 7.1% compared to 8.8% where fresh embryos had been used."

Concerns had previously been raised about the effect of freezing and thawing of embryos, but this study has laid them to rest, the scientists say. "Up till now the data has been extremely limited," said Dr. Pinborg. "There is only one other large birth register study from Sweden which shows similar results to ours. Our findings are of particular importance for Scandinavian countries, where single elective embryo transfer is regarded as the gold standard. This has meant that the use of FER has been rising steadily over the past few years. We wanted to be sure that the procedure had no deleterious effect on the offspring," said Dr. Pinborg.

"The findings are reassuring, although we still lack sub-analyses regarding malformations and neurological sequelae of the FER. But if our results continue to be positive, FER can be accepted as a completely safe procedure, which can be used even more frequently than it is currently," she said.

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