Women who become pregnant during in vitro fertilization (IVF) from previously frozen embryos have a significantly higher chance of developing hypertensive disorders such as preeclampsia than do women who become pregnant through natural conception, researchers have found.
The new findings come from a study presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. In the study, which will soon to be published in Hypertension, researchers analyzed more than 4.5 million pregnancies from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
"Our findings are significant because frozen embryo transfers are increasingly common all over the world, partly due to the elective freezing of all embryos," said Sindre Hoff Petersen, PhD, a fellow in the Department of Public Health and Nursing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who led the study.