We included women who had at least one singleton live birth resulting from a fresh embryo transferred following IVF (including ICSI) treatment in the UK between 2000 and 2017. Babies born following frozen-thawed ET were excluded from the study since day of ET was not available for frozen cycles in the HFEA dataset. As blastocyst stage transfers were infrequent before 2000, we restricted our sample to women treated between 2000 and 2017. We included live born infants whose gestational age was 22 weeks or more, with a minimum birthweight of 500 g. We excluded still births, births in women under 18 years or over 50 years of age, and those involving oocyte donation, embryo donation, preimplantation genetic testing, or surrogacy. Cycles where more than three embryos were transferred were excluded as many of these resulted in triplet and quadruplet births. Births resulting from ETs on Day 6 were excluded as these only involved frozen embryos.
Free full text: Click here