Two Cedars-Sinai physician-researchers have been awarded grants totaling $4 million from the National Institutes of Health to study how the environment - both in the womb and in the hospital where the baby is born - can affect the newborn and the mother.
Pregnancies resulting from fertility treatments are at increased risk for complications, including low birth weight, birth defects and infant mortality. Over 10 percent of people seek fertility treatment and approximately 2 percent of babies born in the United States are conceived using assisted reproductive technologies.
Margareta D. Pisarska, MD, director of the Fertility and Reproductive Medicine Center and director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cedars-Sinai, is the lead investigator of the study examining the causes of pregnancy complications couples can face when they get help to conceive. The study is sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
"We are trying to understand what is causing the increased risk of problems for pregnancies achieved by in vitro fertilization," said Pisarska. "This study is so unique, and the first of its kind in humans, because we will be able to look at the earliest point in human pregnancy, when the fertilized egg implants, to determine if the adverse outcomes are the result of the genetic make-up of the parents that led to problems conceiving in the first place, or whether it is the result of the infertility treatments themselves."
The study, titled "Adverse Outcomes of Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Genetics or Epigenetics," is funded by a $3.37 million grant from the NIH and is expected to take five years to complete. During the study, researchers also will be looking into how the environment influences a pregnancy. "We will be able to look at genes that get turned on right at the beginning of a pregnancy when the fertilized egg implants and compare that to genes that are turned on at the end of pregnancy to give us a snapshot of what is happening in utero. This will give us the ability, not only to look at the pregnancies that are achieved in couples with infertility, but it will also shed light on how normal pregnancies develop in the womb and how the intrauterine environment may affect the overall health of the infant, child and adult, something called fetal origins of adult diseases," Pisarska stated.
