Racial Disparities in IVF Outcomes:
A team of investigators at the University of California, San Francisco examined the records from 1,200 ART cycles at their own clinic performed between 2001 and 2003. They did not find a significant age difference between Asian and non Asian patients. However, they did find that Asian patients had a lower pregnancy rate than non-Asians.
The research here is a bit sketchy, but I was pointed to it by a more thorough and detailed BBC radio report (which I couldn’t find online). Researchers were interviewed and it was made clear that South and East Asians were surveyed in the United States, and their IVF success rates were over 50% lower (a comparison was given that a white women at age 40 had the same chance of conceiving as an Asian woman age 35). Additionally, the researchers offered that IVF clinics in eastern Asia had comparable rates of success as Asian Americans. Since both East and South Asians have these problems, I think it is probable that the issue with the fertility treatment is that these regimes have been developed mostly with European origin patients as test cases and the vast majority of customers remain white.
Posted by razib at 11:29 PM