According to a new study, children who are born after the use of frozen embryo transfer were at higher risk of childhood cancer but the risk remains low.
The study, which was published in the medical journal JAMA, focuses on babies born in a country with one of the highest rates of assisted reproductive technology: Denmark.
In 2018, almost 10% of all children were born through some type of fertility treatment. It should be noted however that scientists already knew that children born with the help of fertility treatments faced increased health risks.
The authors then revealed that less is known about the long-term health consequences of such procedures.
This study looked at data from the Danish Medical Birth Register, the Danish Cancer Registry, along with the Danish Infertility Cohort which included 1,085,172 children born in Denmark between January 1996 and December 31, 2012.
And of those children, 2,217 were diagnosed with cancer. When scientists then compared the number of children born to fertile parents with those born using some type of assistance, they noticed an elevated risk of childhood cancers in the cases where the frozen embryos were used.
But when it came to other types of fertility treatments, there were not statistically significant cancer associations the scientists observed in this study. That being said, the cancer risk was not any higher for children born to parents who used fertility drugs, IVF or intracytoplasmic sperm injection.