New Delhi: A new report has found that at least one million babies have been born in the US using in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other assisted reproductive technologies.
The latest report released by the US Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) this week shows that nearly 68,000 babies were born using one or the other of the methods in 2015.
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, part of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), started to collect data on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in 1985.
For 2015, SART's 371 clinics, which represent more than 90 per cent of the infertility clinics in the US, reported that they performed 213,004 treatment cycles.
Positive trends in treatment and outcomes continued in 2015, with 34.5 per cent of procedures transferring a single embryo, compared to 27.2 per cent in 2014, the report said.
"Fewer embryos transferred leads to lower incidence of multiple birth: 80.5 per cent of babies born from 2015 cycles were singletons, 19.1 per cent twins and fewer than one-half of one per cent were triplets (or higher order)," the report said.
With improvements in egg cryo-preservation techniques, the use of frozen donor eggs has also increased.
At least 2,886 recipient cycle started using frozen donor eggs in 2014, and this number rose to 3,215 in 2015.
The world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in Britain in 1978.
The first American IVF baby was born in the United States in 1981. According to SART, about one in every 100 babies born in the country was conceived using IVF and related treatments.
(With IANS inputs)
