Differential gene expression during placentation in pregnancies conceived with different fertility treatments compared with spontaneous pregnancies.
Lee B, Koeppel AF, Wang ET, Gonzalez TL, Sun T, Kroener L, Lin Y, Joshi NV, Ghadiali T, Turner SD, Rich SS, Farber CR, Rotter JI, Ida Chen YD, Goodarzi MO, Guller S, Harwood B, Serna TB, Williams J 3rd, Pisarska MD.Fertility and Sterility. 2019 Jan 2. pii: S0015-0282(18)32200-3. doi: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2018.11.005.
Links
- PubMed ID: 30611556
- Fertility and Sterility journal article
Layman's summary
One big question in maternal-fetal health research is: how do fertility treatments affect the baby's health and biology? There's some mixed evidence that babies born with the help of fertility treatments may have lower birth weights (though we didn't find this), higher risk of pregnancy complications, and greater risk of metabolic issues later in life. Are these differences due to the parents' innate biology (whatever led to the infertility in the first place) or due to the medical treatments?
To help figure this out, we compared placenta tissue from ongoing pregnancies to see if there were RNA differences between three groups: spontaneous (no infertility), NIFT (non-IVF fertility treatments, e.g. medicine to help stimulate ovulation), and IVF pregnancies. We got RNA from placenta tissue leftover after a late first trimester test called "chorionic villus sampling" (CVS). It is a prenatal diagnostic test that takes a very small biopsy of the placenta to indirectly check the baby's genetics and make sure the pregnancy is healthy. Using CVS tissue gives us a unique opportunity to study first trimester gene expression in pregnancies that lead to live births.
Results and discussion: Only a few individual genes were significantly different between groups, probably because there was a lot of variability within the patient groups. This is good news since it means that gene expression in late first trimester was pretty similar among all patients. We next looked for trends in pathways (groups of genes). Many immune-related pathways were significantly different in IVF vs spontaneous pregnancies, and some also different in the NIFT vs spontaneous pregnancies. Our lab is continuing to study what this means for patients.
