Friday 7 October 2016

First 'three person baby' born using new method - BBC News

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37485263
The world's first baby has been born using a new "three person" fertility technique, New Scientist reveals.
The five-month-old boy has the usual DNA from his mum and dad, plus a tiny bit of genetic code from a donor.
US doctors took the unprecedented step to ensure the baby boy would be free of a genetic condition that his Jordanian mother carries in her genes.
Experts say the move heralds a new era in medicine and could help other families with rare genetic conditions.
But they warn that rigorous checks of this new and controversial technology, called mitochondrial donation, are needed.
It's not the first time scientists have created babies that have DNA from three people - that breakthrough began in the late 1990s - but it is an entirely new and significant method.

Three person babies

Mitochondria are tiny structures inside nearly every cell of the body that convert food into usable energy.
Some women carry genetic defects in mitochondria and they can pass these on to their children.
In the case of the Jordanian family, it was a disorder called Leigh Syndrome that would have proved fatal to any baby conceived. The family had already experienced the heartache of four miscarriages as well as the death of two children - one at eight months and the other at six years of age.

Sons born with fertility treatment 'inherit problems' - BBC News



Boys born to fathers who needed help conceiving have poorer sperm quality as adults than peers conceived without help, a study published in Human Reproduction suggests.

This study, carried out by a team from the Universiteit Brussels - where ICSI was developed - looked at 54 men aged 18 to 22. They were compared with 57 men of the same age.

Men born from ICSI had almost half the sperm concentration and a two-fold lower total sperm count and motile sperm - that can swim well - than men of a similar age whose parents conceived naturally.


They were also nearly three times more likely to have sperm concentrations below the World Health Organization's definition of a "normal" level - 15 million per millilitre of semen - and four times more likely to have total sperm counts below 39 million.