Did you see the recent report that correlated embryo freezing with increased cancer risk? The headline reads “Landmark 16-year Danish IVF Study Points To Babies Born From Frozen Embryos Being 2-3x More Prone to cancer”
Should you worry? Tl;Dr No! Correlation does not equal “causation”.
1. Frozen transfers yield higher results and decrease the time to pregnancy compared to fresh transfers.
2. This conclusion is based on 14 cases of cancer in babies conceived by frozen embryo transfer. A very small number!
3. The incidence of increased cancer risk in these patients is less than half the incidence of cancer in all US children conceived by any means.
4. The study population was mostly the slow freeze method, which is currently obsolete in most high-quality centers. vitrification is now used almost exclusively.
5. The statistical difference in percentages in this study was a 0.0444% incidence of childhood cancer vs. 0.0177%, so still extremely rare.
The study can be found here.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10526200/frozen-embryos-ivf-treatment-cancer-diseases/
