A total of 39,546 babies were born in Spain after the reproduction techniques carried out in 2022, according to the ninth statistical report on assisted reproduction treatments, which has collected the activity of all centers since 2014 and Spanish fertility services.
The National Activity Registry 2022-SEF Registry, presented by the Ministry of Health and the Spanish Fertility Society (SEF) during the XVI Workshop of the SEF Registry Committee, reveals that during the year 2022 a total of 167,195 cycles were carried out of In Vitro Fertilizations (IVF) and 31,635 Artificial Inseminations (AI). This shows that the figures are maintained after the 19 percent increase obtained after the Covid pandemic.
«Although we are witnessing a maintenance of fertility treatments in total numbers, we must take into account that in 2021 the expected treatments were carried out plus those canceled during the pandemic, so this maintenance of cycles and births in 2022 perhaps harbors a growth that we cannot appreciate numerically,” explained the coordinator of the SEF Registry Committee, Dr. Irene Cuevas.
Likewise, the document has also indicated that although births have decreased by a thousand, they represent 12 percent of births in Spain, the largest portion to date attributed to reproductive medicine, according to birth data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) during the last quarter of 2022 and the first three of 2023.
On the other hand, the report indicates a tendency to transfer embryos in the blastocyst state (90 percent in all cycles except with fresh own oocytes); to analyze the embryo genetically to have more information about its chromosomal status and its implantation possibilities; and transferred in the patient’s next hormonal cycle, to prepare the endometrium.
Increases egg vitrification
In addition, the registry provides encouraging data about this technique that is offering the best reproductive results with a clinical gestation rate per transfer of 50 percent in fresh embryos and 58 percent in frozen embryos.
“The egg vitrificationto preserve fertility, for medical reasons in reproductive age or for social reasons, is an increasingly popular technique nowadays,” said Dr. Cuevas.
Likewise, he added that “in the 2022 data report, a total of 2,500 more vitrifications have been recorded than in the previous year and, the truth is that in the clinics we see more and more patients coming back for “the oocytes that they frozen when their fertility was optimal, to be mothers now in their forties or after having overcome a disease such as, for example, oncology.”
More information
Finally, the president of the SEF, Juan José Espídos, highlighted that “although fertility preservation is offering clinical pregnancy rates as good as those of egg donation, there are still many women who do not preserve or who simply do not have the opportunity to do so, so more information is necessary and, above all, improve access to earlier motherhood or, failing that, to preservation.
In this sense, he has highly valued the “big steps” that Spain is taking in reproductive medicine, but he wanted to remember that the entire issue of fertility cannot be left to the medical-scientific community. “We need social and economic policies that get Spain out of this demographic depression,” he claimed. Every year the percentage of children born through assisted reproduction is higher because, even when treatments are maintained, as is the case in 2022, fertility is lower and, therefore, so will natural fertility in the future. .
The SEF has worked with the different scientific societies involved in fertility, as well as with patient associations and other groups, to create a consensus on fertility in Spain that has been conveyed in the last year to all the country’s political forces, waiting for a national fertility pact that promotes policies that improve the reproductive reality in Spain and end regional inequalities.
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