ABSTRACT
Venn and colleagues have recently screened a large cohort of IVF patients for mortality in a large national registry and compared them with control patients1. They found that IVF patients were less likely to die than expected (OR 0.58; 95% CI 0.48-0.69) and they attributed this to a ‘healthy patient effect’, meaning that the unhealthiest women in the population are deterred from pregnancy and infertility treatment. Also, the socioeconomic status of women undergoing IVF may be higher than average. Whatever the bias, when one looks at the data from this Australian study in 29 700 IVF patients, it does not seem that IVF contains a direct threat to life.
