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Deborah Lawlor is co-author on a paper which has recently been posted on medRxiv as a preprint.  “Utilising offspring genotype by proxy Mendelian randomization to investigate the causal effect of offspring traits on parental health” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.11.25329457v1

The BRIST-IVF team have posted a preprint on medRxiv “Cohort profile: The Bristol IVF Study- A longitudinal study of women, their partners and treatment outcomes following assisted reproductive technologies”. The paper describes the Bristol IVF Study and concludes that the cohort enables novel research into the predictors and consequences of ART conception, with comparison to a naturally conceived cohort, the second generation of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC-G2).

Dr Kirsty Bowman, Senior Research Associate in Medical Statistics, recently attended the Wellcome Connecting Science conference: Women’s Health: Genes, Data and Advancing Approaches. Kirsty presented some preliminary work with Deborah Lawlor on genetically instrumenting infertility and looking at associations with diseases as a poster: “Identifying potential causal effects of infertility: a Mendelian randomization phenome-wide association study”.

In this video Deborah Lawlor gives an introduction to the Molecular drivers & predictors of pregnancy complications & future health programme at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) at the University of Bristol. Deborah talks about how the ART-Health programme fits into her wider programme of work.

Deborah Lawlor and Ahmed Elhakeem took part and presented at the GW4 funded inFer Network 2^nd meeting.

The GW4 grant that supported this event is linked to ART-health and supports us collaborating with academics from different disciplines.

An illustrated visual capturing the key ideas from the talks and activities of the event can be viewed below and on the inFer website here.

Ahmed Elhakeem presented on the ART-HEALTH partnership at the GW4 inFer (https://gw4.ac.uk/community/fertility-in-vitro-in-silico-in-clinico/) launch event. This a network of interdisplinary people aiming to improve the success rate of IVF.

Read editorial on our latest research here

Melbourne ART and Health meeting 14/02/2023

The aim of the meeting was to bring together collaborators with the European Research Council funded A.R.T-HEALTH programme from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China and Japan to meet in person and share previous and on-going research projects and plans.

Brief Meeting notes: Melbourne ART Summary notes

A large study looking at the effects of fertility treatment has found no robust difference in blood pressure, heart rate, lipids, and glucose measurements between children conceived naturally and those conceived using assisted reproductive technologies (ART).

Differences in the growth, weight, and body fat levels of children conceived through fertility treatment are small, and no longer apparent by late adolescence, finds new research.