University of Newcastle reproductive biologist John Aitken says IVF is producing a new generation of infertile children.

IVF is producing a new generation of infertile Australian children who will require expensive medical treatment to produce their own offspring, says University of Newcastle laureate professor John Aitken.

He also warned of ongoing health problems with IVF children, suggesting that male children of ageing fathers who used assisted pregnancy procedures were prone to cancer.

Dr Aitken said affluence had become the enemy of fertility as Australians increasingly turned to IVF and other assisted pregnancy procedures.

One in six Australian couples use IVF.

One in every 25 Australian children are now born as a result of IVF.

A decade ago it was one in 35 births.

Dr Aitken predicted that unless there was a rethink, Australia was well on the way to replicating the Danish experience where one in 15 children were IVF babies.

He said the trend to IVF raised equity issues in how much money society should pay helping couples have children and research was revealing previously unsuspected health risks such as increased cancer rates among boys whose fathers – but not mothers – smoked and used assisted conception techniques.

“We should guard against recklessly marching into a future where we use too much assisted conception in order to compensate for our loss of fertility,” he said.

“Its an inexorable upward trend. We are taking recourse to IVF in increasing numbers and the thing we have to remember as a society is that the more you use assisted conception in one generation, the more you’re going to need it in the next.”

Director of the University of Newcastle’s large 50-staff Priority Research Centre for Reproductive Science and the 2012 NSW Scientist of the Year, Dr Aitken is world-renown for his work on the largely neglected field of male reproduction.

Delivering a lecture at the BoschInstitute, Human fertility: How Lifestyle, Affluence and the Medical Profession are killing our Species, Professor Aitken criticised the IVF industry for ignoring the fact that failure to conceive stemmed largely from male fertility problems.

He said the human male was not a very fertile individual.

“Roughly one in 20 is infertile … An old lecturer of mine used to say if men were bulls [they would] all be taken out to backyard and shot,” Prof Aitken said.

Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) – binding a sperm cell to an egg – was an IVF procedure now being used by many couples.

But the reproductive biologist said new ICSI research coming out of Belgium showed there may be a price to pay:

“There is a negative pay-off. If you have a son from this process it is possible that he too will have the same pathology that you had.”

Dr Aitken said fertility rates tracked affluence down history.

For instance, high child mortality rates in Victorian London saw couples have an average 11 children for two to survive.

Growing affluence across the world has resulted in fertility rates plummeting over the last century and many societies are going backwards in terms of fertility rates. Only Niger and Afghanistan, Prof Aitken said, now had significant population growth.

In Australia, the fertility rate has fallen to about 1.77 children per couple, well below the replacement rate of 2.2.

He said women were at their most fertile around 19 or 20 but Australian society’s growing affluence had made many put off having children in the belief that they could use IVF.

There was an urgent need to instigate societal change to accommodate educated women in the workforce.

“We cannot change their fundamental biology,” Prof Aitken said.

“The average age of women in IVF is 36/7 years. If you’re contemplating a family when you’re close to the edge, IVF cannot fix you up. IVF live birth rates decline from 35 to 42 exactly the same way in naturally conceived population.

“The unfortunate thing is that the biology doesn’t understand that narrative.”

The story IVF producing new generation of infertile Australian children says professor John Aitken first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.