Puberty process in children born from Assisted Reproductive Technologies: a review study

The quality of puberty can affect the sexual health and fertility of children. There is limited evidence about the risks associated with the use of assisted reproductive methods (ART) on the process of puberty. This review study was conducted with aim to investigate the puberty process in ART children.

In this review study, to find the related articles regarding the puberty process in ART children, the databases of Web of Science, Scopous, Proquest and Pubmed and Persian databases of SID and Magiran and Google Scholar search engine were searched to find published studies using English keywords: Assisted Reproductive Technology, In vitro fertilization, Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, puberty, Tanner and adolescent and their Persian equivalents.

In total, among 1438 articles found, 10 articles were eligible for the research and were selected for this study. The prevalence of puberty disorders in ART children was not different compared to children resulting from spontaneous pregnancy. Tanner's stages, bone growth, hormonal status among adolescents resulting from ART were similar to the normal population, although in girls resulting from ART were exposed to earlier puberty and boys were exposed to small differences in sex hormones compared to children resulting from spontaneous pregnancy.

Although many studies did not show a significant difference in the puberty process of ART adolescents compared to other adolescents, information on long-term follow-up is limited. Therefore, it is necessary to long-term follow-up of ART-born children until completion of puberty by child's sex and ART types.