Fertility Treatment and Childhood Cancer Risk
Menée à Taïwan à partir de données portant sur 2 308 016 triades parents-enfants, cette étude de cohorte analyse l'association entre un recours à des technologies de procréation médicalement assistée et le risque de cancer chez l'enfant (1 880 cas de cancer pédiatrique)
Elsewhere in JAMA Network Open, Weng et al1 assessed the risk of childhood cancer in children born following fertility treatment, based on nationwide registry data from Taiwan using a nested case-control study design. They found that children born via assisted reproduction technology (ART) conception have a higher risk of any type of childhood cancer, as well as leukemia and hepatic tumors, compared with children born via either natural conception or parental subfertility. The increased risk was found not to be mediated by perinatal factors. The report by Weng et al1 is unique, as no other study based on registry data from a large Asian population has previously been published on the association between ART and childhood cancer. Furthermore, this work is important because the main limitations of studies to date include self-reported exposure data and small study sizes, leading to potential bias and imprecise risk estimates. Additionally, few studies have been able to consider the possibility of confounding by indication (ie, the underlying subfertility of the parents), which was done by Weng et al.1 According to the authors, the data completeness, validity, and possibility of individual-level data linkage of the Taiwan registry data rival those of the Nordic registries. If correct, this study significantly contributes to previously published literature.(...)