• Wei Zhou, Wanbing Feng, Jinli Chang, Jingmei Hu, Fuxia Li, Kuona Hu, Jiejing Jiao, Xinyi Xue, Ting Lan, Wenjing Wan, Zi-Jiang Chen, and Linlin Cui.
• State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine and Offspring Health, Center for Reproductive Medicine, Institute of Women, Children and Reproductive Health, the Second Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China.
• PLoS Med. 2024 Jun 1; 21 (6): e1004388e1004388.

BackgroundFrozen embryo transfer (FET) has become a widely employed assisted reproductive technology technique. There have historically been concerns regarding the long-term metabolic safety of FET technology in offspring due to pregnancy-induced hypertension and large for gestational age, both of which are well-recognized factors for metabolic dysfunction of children. Therefore, we aimed to compare the metabolic profiles of children born after frozen versus fresh embryo transfer at 2 to 5 years of age.Methods And FindingsThis was a prospective cohort study. Using data from the "Assisted Reproductive Technology borned KIDs (ARTKID)," a birth cohort of offspring born from assisted reproductive technology at the Institute of Women, Children and Reproductive Health, Shandong University, China. We included 4,246 singletons born after FET (n = 2,181) and fresh embryo transfer (n = 2,065) enrolled between 2008 and 2019 and assessed the glucose and lipid variables until the age of 2 to 5 years. During a mean follow-up of 3.6 years, no significant differences were observed in fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin, Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance Index, total cholesterol, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, and high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol levels between offspring conceived by fresh and frozen embryo transfer in the crude model and adjusted model (adjusted for parental age, parental body mass index, parental education level, paternal smoking, parity, offspring age and sex). These results remained consistent across subgroup analyses considering offspring age, the stage of embryo transfer, and the mode of fertilization. Results from sensitivity analysis on children matched for age within the cohort remains the same. The main limitation of our study is the young age of the offspring.ConclusionsIn this study, the impact of FET on glucose and lipid profiles during early childhood was comparable to fresh embryo transfer. Long-term studies are needed to evaluate the metabolic health of offspring born after FET.Copyright: © 2024 Zhou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

18 keywords...

hide…