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Infertility affects more than 15% of couples worldwide. Thanks to medical science, infertility treatments have come a long way over the past few years. For millions of people, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has opened a medical pathway to having biological children. This procedure gives fertilization a helping hand outside the body. It involves retrieving eggs from the ovaries and fertilizing them with sperm in a laboratory to create embryos.

Despite its benefits, IVF has also raised questions about the long-term health of children conceived through the procedure. Large epidemiological studies have found that these children have a slightly higher risk of developing certain health conditions later in life.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology examined whether the stress embryos experience during IVF laboratory procedures could alter how certain DNA elements move within the genome, potentially putting babies conceived through the process at higher risk of these long-term health conditions.

IVF-conceived babies had a higher overall amount of LINE-1 (short for Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements-1) DNA in their genomes compared with naturally conceived babies. Most of our DNA stays in one place, but LINE-1 (Long Interspersed Nuclear Element-1) is part of a family of transposable elements that can remodel the human genome. These jumping genes can copy themselves and insert those copies into new locations, and this movement showed up at specific points in the genome.

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