Herbal medicines may hinder IVF treatment, says study
LONDON: Infertile women who supplement their fertility treatment with alternative medicines may be harming their chances of becoming pregnant, according to controversial research by psychologists.
A year-long study of 818 women found that those who turned to complementary therapies such as herbal medicines, reflexology and acupuncture while having IVF treatment were at least 30 percent less likely to become pregnant than women who did not.
A team led by Jacky Boivin, a psychologist at Cardiff University, investigated the effects of alternative therapies, because they are increasingly being used by women undergoing fertility treatment.
Some herbal treatments are marketed as natural remedies for infertility, while others claim to improve women's chances of getting pregnant by reducing their stress levels.
Dr Boivin says it is unclear what is to blame for the apparent drop in pregnancy rates, but says the effect may be due to herbal medicines interacting with and disrupting drugs and hormones used in fertility treatment.
Of the women followed in the study, 261 tried alternative therapies alongside their standard IVF treatment. Of those women, nearly half took herbal medicines.
Over the 12-month period, the women who used alternative medicines had an average of 2.4 cycles of IVF treatment, leading to pregnancies in 45.2 percent of them.
Those who had only conventional fertility treatment had an average of 1.91 IVF cycles over the year, leading to pregnancies in 66.4 percent, Dr Boivin told a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon last week.
"It looks like complementary therapies might not be as benign as previously thought, at least with regard to fertility treatment," she says.
The findings were met with caution from some experts. Many women who turn to alternative therapies do so out of desperation, because they have failed to become pregnant by conventional IVF treatment, says Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University.
"Those women who are more prone to stress and have more health problems are more likely to try complementary medicine, so complementary medicine could only be a marker, and not the cause, of stress or lower success rates."
Similar results have been found in looking at the use of alternative therapies among cancer patients.
Dr Boivin says although she could not rule out confounding factors, the study is designed to take into account any previously failed attempts to become pregnant, and also the women's socioeconomic status and mental health.
Experts say that while the study did not provide definitive guidance for women thinking of using alternative therapies, it raised an important issue. "We cannot start with the assumption that these therapies do no harm," says Andrea Braverman, director of psychological and complementary care at Reproductive Medicine Associates in New Jersey.
A separate study raised concerns that those fertility clinics which screen embryos to boost a woman's chances of a successful pregnancy may inadvertently be damaging their patients' chances of having a baby.
The finding suggests that women who pay up to $4,000 for the procedure may be less likely to give birth afterwards.
Doctors at the Academic Medical Centre at the University of Amsterdam studied 408 women aged 35-41 and found that only 24 percent of those who received the procedure had babies, compared with 35 percent of women whose embryos were implanted without being screened. Genetic screening of embryos has become increasingly popular at IVF clinics since 1997, though it is still relatively uncommon in Britain.
The Guardian
(China Daily 07/11/2007 page19)
