National register for ICSI children

Plans to set up a national register of children conceived using a relatively new infertility treatment have been given the go-ahead by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the body that governs fertility treatments in the UK.

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), used to treat male infertility, has resulted in about 3000 births in the UK and is currently used in a quarter of all IVF treatments. But initial research has raised some concern about the potentially greater risk of congenital abnormalities in resulting children.

The application to set up a register was made by Dr Alastair Sutcliffe, senior lecturer at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London and Dr Mike Hawkins from the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Birmingham. Dr Sutcliffe presented the final report of the only British research conducted into ICSI at the British Fertility Society's annual conference last week.