Consent form developed for infertility therapy

By Karla Gale

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) has developed a comprehensive document for doctors to use when obtaining informed consent from patients seeking infertility treatment.

"This is our compilation of the important elements of informed consent that should be reviewed with patients," incoming SART president Dr. Elizabeth Ginsburg said in an interview with Reuters Health. "It's designed to be used 'as is,' or it can be used by clinics to adjust their own consent forms."

As presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in San Francisco, the form explains the different options available to patients, including, among others, in vitro fertilization and embryo frozen storage or "cryopreservation."

"From the standpoint of informed consent I don't think there is any area of medicine that is more complicated than assisted reproductive technology," said Ginsburg, a reproductive endocrinologist from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "It involves not just the risks of treatment, but also potential unknown risk to offspring, since this is a relatively new field."

The document also goes into ethical, legal, and psychosocial issues of assisted reproductive technology.

The document will be available to SART members at www.sart.org/.