As part of a recent study in JAMA Psychiatry, Swedish researchers at Karolinska Institutet have shown that young adults born after assisted reproduction tend to experience good mental health
as a result.
“These findings are overall reassuring with respect to the psychiatric health of adolescents conceived with assisted reproductive techniques (ART), a group that we are now for the first time able to follow into early adulthood,” according to one co-author of the study.
Researchers looked through the data of over 1.2 million Swedish people born between 1994 and 2006, with nearly 32,000 participants examined. The participants were in either adolescence or early adulthood.
“In the end, we did not find that use of ART had any adverse influence on children’s psychiatric health as they go through adolescence,” researchers determined.
“Individuals conceived with ART had a slightly elevated risk of OCD compared with the general population but this was explained by differences in the background of the parents, as this excess risk was no longer present after adjustment for various parental characteristics.”
