Clinics pushing costly add-on treatments that may be harmful
DESPERATE couples sold extra treatments by fertility clinics are risking miscarriage, premature birth and kidney failure, a report warns.
Couples are often convinced by private doctors to pay for ‘add-ons’ such as medication to ‘activate’ their eggs, glue to ‘stick’ embryos to the womb or egg yolk drips to suppress the immune system.
But some of these add-ons – which cost up to £3,500 – can actually harm a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant.
They are also putting their health at risk, potentially damaging their kidneys and causing septicaemia, according to a report on the top-up procedures by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA).
The chairman of the fertility regulator, whose committee produced the draft report, is now questioning whether private clinics should be allowed to charge for such add-on treatments.
Sally Cheshire claimed it was not ‘the right thing’ to bill ‘desperate’ people for pro-
‘Kidney failure and blood clots’
cedures without any scientific evidence behind them.
The report focuses on nine add-on treatments and rates them with traffic light colours according to how safe they are.
The final ratings will be published in the coming weeks but the Mail has seen the initial findings of an expert adviser.
This includes no green lights, meaning none of the procedures are backed by any high quality evidence that they work.
The regulator warns of a risk of miscarriage from ‘artificial egg activation’ in which a woman’s egg is stimulated with chemicals to mimic the trigger for embryo development when it meets sperm.
The report of its scientific committee says: ‘In theory, egg activation using calcium ionophores could cause embryos to have abnormal numbers of chromosomes, which would cause the pregnancy to miscarry.’
Assisted hatching, in which clinics use acid and lasers to help the embryo ‘hatch’ from a thick layer of proteins, risks damaging it. So does pre-implantation screening, used to check for abnormalities that can cause Down’s syndrome.
Damage to an embryo can end a pregnancy because it then fails to develop properly, preventing it becoming a baby in the womb.
Worryingly, the HFEA warns that this screening can show up nonexistent problems. The committee also warns that a process known as an endometrial ‘scratch’ can give women harmful infections. The procedure involves scratching the lining of the womb to give an embryo a furrow it can nestle in.
The regulator also rubbished immunology treatment to stop a woman’s body rejecting her child because it is genetically different.
The complete lack of convincing evidence that it works comes with ‘serious’ risks such as kidney failure, blood clots, septicaemia and premature birth from three kinds of drugs offered by clinics.
These include intralipid infusions, which contain egg yolk, soybean oil, glycerine and water and are used to suppress the immune system. The committee recommends red traffic lights for four add-on IVF treatments with ‘little or no published evidence to support them’ and four amber ones for which there is only ‘moderate evidence’.
Speaking last month at an event held by the Progress Educational Trust charity, Mrs Cheshire called for more clinical trials, adding: ‘If you are asking a patient to pay for a treatment that is not proven when they are absolutely desperate, then I don’t think that’s the right thing to do, and I will put my hand up and say we need to be really careful about that.’
The report follows an expose by the BBC’s Panorama last year in which academics concluded 26 out of 27 treatments were of no benefit. After looking at a decade of research, an independent reviewer consulted by the HFEA recommended that four treatments be downgraded to red or amber because of a lack of evidence.
The industry’s defence is that some procedures probably do work, but that trials simply cannot get funding to test them properly.
Professor Adam Balen, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: ‘We should be focusing on making sure patients are fully informed about the treatments that clinics are offering, the current evidence for benefit and whether there are any side-effects or risks.’