Over the past 34 years, 5 million "children from the test tube"
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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At least five million so-called "test tube children" have been born in the world since July 1978, when the first such child, Louise Brown, was born. This figure, according to MedicalXpress, was announced at the 28th annual congress of ESHRE (European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology), which takes place in Istanbul from July 1 to 4.
A rough estimate of the number of children conceived through the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) by July 2012 was made by the ICMART (International Committee for Monitoring ART) based on data on the number of IVF and ICSI cycles conducted in the world over thirty years, from 1978 to 2008 years. The authors estimated that for the year the number of conceived as a result of artificial insemination increases by approximately 350-400 thousand (in 2011, it was reported about 4.6 million "children from a test tube") and on this basis they assumed that now their total number reached a round figure in five million.
According to ICMART, annually around 1.5 million cycles of ART are produced worldwide. Among the regions of the world in which reproductive technologies are actively used, Europe leads, and among the countries - the United States and Japan.
The ESHRE congress provides data showing that the demand for ART among Europeans is constantly growing - if in 2008 in Europe, 532 260 cycles of IVF and ICSI were performed, and in 2009, 537,287. On average, according to Dr. Anne Pia Ferraretti (Anna Pia Ferraretti), head of the ESHRE Consortium for Monitoring IVF, the need for ART is estimated at fifteen hundred cycles per million population, but varies from country to country.
Thus, in seven European countries this indicator is significantly higher than the average in Denmark (2726 cycles per million population), Belgium (2526), Czechia (1851), Slovenia (1840), Sweden (1800), Norway (1780) and Finland (1701) ). At the same time, in four countries this indicator is much lower than the average in Great Britain (879 cycles of ART per million population), Italy (863), Germany (830) and Austria (747).
The availability of IVF for the population depends, first of all, on the policy of local authorities and on the amount of state funding, and it turns out that in Europe it is much higher than in the US and lower than in Australia.
As noted by Dr. Ferraretti, the best indicator of the success of ART is the ratio of the number born to the number of embryos embryos. According to her, this indicator has been growing steadily in recent years, that is, the success of procedures is increasing.
Another, noted in recent years in Europe, the trend, said Ferraretti, is the reduction in demand for the embedding of several embryos and, accordingly, multiple pregnancies. As a result, the triplets conceived with the help of ART are now less than one percent of all those born, and the percentage of such twins fell below 20 (19.6 percent) for the first time.
The experimental method of infertility treatment - in vitro fertilization - was developed by British doctors Robert Edwards (Robert Edwards) and Patrick Steptoe (Patric Steptoe). The first child to be born through this procedure was Louise Brown, born July 25, 1978. Currently, ART procedures include, in addition to IVF, an intracytoplasmic injection of sperm into the oocyte (ICSI), as well as some other techniques.