Michele Hansen

Juggling Act

Michele Hansen certainly keeps herself busy. As well as working part-time at the Institute, Michele is completing her PhD and has the daily joys of being a full-time mother to two young children.

Michele manages a large record-linkage study examining health outcomes for children born following assisted reproductive technologies (ART). She is comparing the prevalence of cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, hospital admission and birth defects in infants born after assisted conception in Western Australia between 1993 and 2000 to all other WA infants born over the same period.

It's an important area of research, given that Australia has one of the world's highest rates of treating infertility by assisted conception. The wide application of assisted conception treatment in Australia, and the increased number of pregnancies achieved by these means, provides an impetus for Michele to continue to collect and analyse data.

In 2002, Michele made a discovery that provoked international interest. She found that for WA babies conceived following assisted conception, there was a two-fold increased risk of being diagnosed with a major birth defect by one year of age compared to spontaneously conceived WA infants. Publishing her first paper on this research in The New England Journal of Medicine has been a major highlight of Michele's research career.

Michele credits the ability to do this research to WA's unique Reproductive Technology Register. "Western Australia is the only Australian State and one of only a few places in the world with a statutory register of reproductive technology," Michele says. "We can link these data to other WA population health registers to examine information on a broad range of health outcomes for assisted conception children."

Whilst Michele can't see past the end of her PhD yet, she hopes that her work will influence the information given to patients prior to commencing fertility treatment.

"I think it is very important that prospective assisted reproductive technology patients are given as much information as possible about any potential side-effects of treatment," Michele says. "They should also be informed about adverse health risks for their offspring so that they can make informed choices about their treatment options."

While even small increases in the risk of adverse health outcomes such as birth defects, low birthweight, and preterm birth may be quite worrying for some couples considering ART, Michele stresses that the majority of babies will be born healthy. "ART has brought great happiness to many thousands of infertile couples world-wide. Our goal is to contribute to research examining if and why there are increased risks of some adverse health outcomes in ART infants, for the sake of the parents and their children."