NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children born following intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) do not differ from children conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) or naturally conceived children in cognitive or motor development at 5 years of age, the results of a multinational study show.

Because ICSI bypasses natural sperm-selection barriers and may use suboptimal spermatozoa, there have been concerns that this may affect developmental outcomes, Dr. A. G. Sutcliffe and colleagues report in the March issue of Pediatrics.

Dr. Sutcliffe, from the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, and associates tested 511 children conceived by ICSI, 424 conceived by IVF and 488 naturally conceived children. The subjects were recruited from clinics in five European countries.

Children were approximately 5 years old when they underwent testing with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised and the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (Motor Scale).

There were no differences among the groups on the verbal, IQ, performance IQ or full-scale IQ scales of the Wechsler test, or the Motor Scale scores of the McCarthy test.

Moreover, there were no differences in the number of children who scored below one standard deviation from the mean on the Wechsler scales.

"No interaction effects were found between the mode of conception and demographic variables, indicating that these results were not influenced by gender, nationality, maternal educational level, or maternal age at the time of birth," Dr. Sutcliffe's team writes.

Only in the subgroup of firstborn children with mothers who gave birth between ages 33 to 45 did naturally conceived children score significantly better in the verbal and full scale scores of the Wechsler test compared with those born by assisted reproductive technology.

Even in this subgroup, however, the difference was less than 1 IQ point higher in the naturally conceived group, suggesting that the difference had "no clinical relevance."

Pediatrics 2005;115:e283-e289

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