THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Babies conceived via IVF are SIX TIMES more likely to have high blood pressure as teenagers (?)

As the father of an adult son conceived via IVF, I have some personal interest in this study. On looking at it in detail, however, I doubt that the results are much cause for concern. The "sample" size is small, there was apparently no attempt at random sampling and the average differences found are very slight.

Additionally, I cannot see that they have excluded the effects observed as being due to differences in the mothers rather than differences in the method of conception. The authors claim to have controlled for differences in the mothers but it is not clear to me how to do that. Mothers who have to resort to IVF would usually have subtle health differences that could have non-obvious effects. The cause of infertility is quite often rather mysterious but it is there.

And the father cannot be omitted from consideration either. It can often be the father who is infertile (has a low sperm count or deficient sperm motility) and that could have complex ramifications. The father may have broader health problems that are passed on genetically. I presume the authors were careful enough to leave out conceptions due to ICSI, which is a whole different ballgame (no pun intended).

Those objections do however have the character of denying that any research into the method of conception is possible and I do not want to claim that so let us look again at the other problems in the study. The sample size is not impossibly small but it very much at the low end of what we expect in delivering stable results. And that doubt is sharpened when we look at the average differences in BP. 120/71, compared to 116/69, is a trivial difference and founding it on a small sample makes it a trivial finding.

And the criterion for high blood pressure is very severe: more than 130/80. In normal clinical practice that would count as being within the normal range.

And the lack of random sampling in assembling the study population is a very large lacuna. Unless you have some evidence that your sample is representative you cannot validly generalize from it. Hoping or assuming that it is representative reduces the study to a work of faith, not a work of science

So the study is interesting but far from conclusive. I append the journal abstract

Thousands of children born each year by IVF could be at risk of serious heart problems in later life, a study suggests.

Scientists found signs of 'premature vascular aging' in children as young as 11 who had been conceived as a result of fertility treatment.

And by the age of 16 IVF children were six times more likely to have high blood pressure - a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

The scientists believe how embryos are fertilised and manipulated before they are implanted into a woman's uterus may cause small genetic changes that affect a baby's heart and circulatory system.

They warn that the soaring use of IVF 'may have come at a price' for many children, who could suffer cardiovascular disease as a result.

Children conceived via IVF have higher blood pressure readings

Researchers from University Hospital in Bern, Switzerland, tracked 54 seemingly healthy children who had been born via IVF, and compared them to 43 children born naturally.

They found at age 11 and 12 the IVF children had a 25 per cent narrower brachial artery - the major blood vessel in the arm - and their arteries had thicker walls.

The team then tracked the children for five years. At the age of 16 and 17 the IVF children were far more likely to have developed high blood pressure. They had an average blood pressure of 120/71, compared to 116/69 for the teenagers who had been conceived naturally.

Crucially, eight of those conceived via IVF had developed 'hypertension' - the medical term for high blood pressure, involving a reading of more than 130/80. Only one of the teenagers conceived naturally had hypertension.

The study bolsters the results of previous research which found mice born to IVF had heart problems.

SOURCE

Association of Assisted Reproductive Technologies With Arterial Hypertension During Adolescence

Théo A.Meister MD et al.

Abstract

Background: Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been shown to induce premature vascular aging in apparently healthy children. In mice, ART-induced premature vascular aging evolves into arterial hypertension. Given the young age of the human ART group, long-term sequelae of ART-induced alterations of the cardiovascular phenotype are unknown.

Objectives: This study hypothesized that vascular alterations persist in adolescents and young adults conceived by ART and that arterial hypertension possibly represents the first detectable clinically relevant endpoint in this group.

Methods: Five years after the initial assessment, the study investigators reassessed vascular function and performed 24-h ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring (ABPM) in 54 young, apparently healthy participants conceived through ART and 43 age- and sex-matched controls.

Results: Premature vascular aging persisted in ART-conceived subjects, as evidenced by a roughly 25% impairment of flow-mediated dilation of the brachial artery (p < 0.001) and increased pulse-wave velocity and carotid intima-media thickness. Most importantly, ABPM values (systolic BP, 119.8 ± 9.1 mm Hg vs. 115.7 ± 7.0 mm Hg, p = 0.03; diastolic BP, 71.4 ± 6.1 mm Hg vs. 69.1 ± 4.2 mm Hg, p = 0.02 ART vs. control) and BP variability were markedly higher in ART-conceived subjects than in control subjects. Eight of the 52 ART participants, but only 1 of the 43 control participants (p = 0.041 ART vs. controls) fulfilled ABPM criteria of arterial hypertension (>130/80 mm Hg and/or >95th percentile).

Conclusions: ART-induced premature vascular aging persists in apparently healthy adolescents and young adults without any other detectable classical cardiovascular risk factors and progresses to arterial hypertension. (Vascular Dysfunction in Offspring of Assisted Reproduction Technologies; NCT00837642.)
Central Illustratio

Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Volume 72, Issue 11, 11 September 2018, Pages 1267-1274

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

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