Adolescents conceived through IVF show similar psychosocial development to adolescents conceived naturally and have comparable relationships with their parents, researchers report.
Hilde Colpin and G. Bossaert from the University of Leuven in Belgium previously compared psychosocial development at age 2 years in children born naturally and those born using IVF.
Most previous studies of this kind have found no statistically significant differences between children conceived through IVF and those conceived naturally, but these focused on young children, mostly less than 5 years of age.
For the current report, Colpin and Bossaert studied 24 of the families involved in the original research, each of which had a child conceived through IVF now aged 15 or 16 years.
The investigators assessed psychosocial development in these families and in 21 control families with children born through natural means.
The results of this assessment show that parents who used IVF to conceive and their children are not significantly different to families who did not use IVF in terms of parenting style, parenting-related stress, and behavioural problems in the child.
Behavioral problems also occurred at a similar frequency in children who knew they were conceived using IVF and those who did not, the team reports.
"As far as we know, this is the first psychosocial study following up IVF families into children's mid-adolescence and the first to investigate adjustment level by disclosure status in this age group," conclude the investigators.
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