Dr. Sahar Wertheimer was recently quoted in an article for Medical News Today written by Christopher Curley titled “Fertility treatments linked to higher risk of stroke: What to know.”
A new study suggests that people who receive fertility treatments might have a higher risk of stroke and hospitalization from a stroke within a year after delivery than those who did not receive such treatments. These findings come from a new retrospective study of more than 31 million pregnant women ages 15 to 54 and conducted by researchers at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.
Dr. Sahar Wertheimer, a reproductive endocrinologist at HRC Fertility in West Los Angeles, California, agreed. “I find it a compelling study because we do think of elevated estrogen levels (inherent in IVF) as a risk factor for stroke and we do know that IVF [in vitro fertilization] causes increased vascular risks during pregnancy,” she told Medical News Today. “However, drawing the conclusion that infertility treatment causes strokes and not that perhaps women with infertility are predisposed to strokes for the same underlying causes as their infertility is a dangerous conclusion. For example, I did not see a family history included in the baseline demographics.”
She goes on to discuss that the absolute risks reported in the study were still small enough that they shouldn’t necessarily discourage hopeful patients. To learn more about fertility and stroke risk, read the article in its entirety here.