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Good morning! We’ve got something a little different for you today – an amazing new story from Megan Molteni, and also a peek at the story behind the story.
And speaking of peeks — I’d recommend this new episode of Commons Healthcare, which examines STAT’s investigative prowess and features interviews with Executive Editor Rick Berke and the late, inimitable Helen Branswell.
Inside the global fertility industry using women as ‘guinea pigs’
Heidy Willis was struggling to get pregnant. And after several rounds of failed IVF, she was willing to try anything.
So Willis flew to Albania for a process known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, or MRT. Willis’ genetic material was inserted into another woman’s egg cells. The idea is that the donor’s healthy mitochondria power the embryo into a healthy fetus and, eventually, a baby.
MRT is not legal in the U.S. But medical tourism agencies charge thousands of dollars to connect women to clinics around the world. Many of these companies target women over 40, even though there’s scant evidence the procedure can help unwind age-related infertility.
“You’re paying for the privilege of being a guinea pig,” a John Hopkins bioethicist told STAT’s Megan Molteni.
Megan has spent the last eight months doggedly investigating the companies connecting women to MRT treatments, talking to dozens of patients, employees and researchers. Some of her findings are, quite frankly, shocking. There’s a coda to Willis’s story, for example, that made me gasp out loud.
Set aside some time today or this week to dive into the story. And below, Megan took the time to answer some of my questions about this remarkable piece of journalism.
How did the idea for this story come about?
Back in 2019, I’d reported on the results of a small pilot study of MRT for infertility and since then have continued to cover developments.
In February of this year, I was contacted by a couple in the U.K. who wanted to tell me about an experience they had with a reproductive tourism company called IFG that was marketing MRT as a sort of miracle treatment for age-related infertility. The woman in this couple was a doctor in her 40s and she’d been taken in by the hope that was being offered for her to have a genetically related child of her own, despite there being scant evidence that it improves the odds of pregnancy for older women.
Ultimately, she didn’t go through with MRT because of some bad experiences she had leading up to it. But she was in touch with a number of other women who were actively in the process and she helped me get connected to them to hear more about their stories.
What was the biggest reporting challenge?
Reproductive tourism is the business of breaking procreation into distinct components that can be routed around regulations and assembled at the end to result in a baby. It is, by design, a complex chain of events often facilitated by multiple companies across multiple jurisdictions to circumvent local laws and so is a pretty opaque process.
With MRT, you’re adding even more layers of scientific and legal maneuvering to make it possible. So getting inside required actually going to the places that patients were going, including a clinic in Albania, where the laws are more amenable to technologies like MRT.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
One of the things that was most surprising was that we were able to get our hands on this long-awaited data from a clinic in Ukraine that had been at one time the most prolific provider of MRT, before the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022.
I had been aware of them for years, thanks to reporting by NPR and this Netflix documentary.
Scientists I know in this space have been awaiting this publication of data, but with the war breaking out, things had gone rather silent. I reached out to their former embryologist, Pavlo Mazur, to ask him what he thought about these commercial clinics offering MRT for age-related infertility, not really expecting to hear back.
Instead, that started months of conversations. He had data he wanted in the world but hadn’t been able to publish, for some reasons that make a lot of sense, and for some others that have to do with biases against science coming out of countries like Ukraine without a long history of evidence-based medicine and well-regulated biomedical research. Their results are the strongest refutation of the idea that MRT can be a silver bullet remedy for age-related infertility.
The health policies that could be transformed after the election
No matter what happens tomorrow, health care policy could be in for a shakeup. That’s the message from more than two dozen policymakers, lobbyists, and experts STAT’s Daniel Payne spoke with.
Of course, control of Congress will shape what happens next. But some of Daniel’s sources said the anger with the health care status quo runs deep. One health policy consultant said they’re telling insurance leaders that they predict “significant” changes to the fundamentals of American health care, and that they should “be afraid.”
If you prefer your election predictions via video, check out our new “STATus Report”. And if you haven’t yet checked out our midterms page, do it today! Who knows what it will hold after tomorrow!
Elections may be bad for your heart
Did Daniel’s story about the stakes of tomorrow’s election get your heart racing? It turns out, you’re not alone.
As STAT’s Liz Cooney reports, “studies have found a significantly higher chance of arrhythmias in the weeks just before and after elections, and an increased rate of hospitalizations for heart attacks right after voting day.”
The issue is stress. A deluge of news can raise your adrenaline and amp up your sympathetic nervous system, which can in turn alter the heart’s electrical activity. This makes abnormal rhythms more likely in someone already prone to them. Interested to learn about what researchers found when they looked at heart health around the 2020 and 2016 elections? Read more.
What doctors need to know about cancer and pregnancy
Years ago, maternal fetal medicine doctor Elyce Cardonick met two pregnant women, both suffering from ovarian cancer. The women became friends, meeting up with their newborns and comparing wigs after hair loss.
One of those mothers is thriving, alongside her 28-year-old twins. The other didn’t live to see her child turn three.
Why did one die and the other survive? Read this new First Opinion for answers.
What we’re reading
- Serbia just elected the world’s brainiest parliament, Science
- Doctors say a rare kind of measles Is on the rise, The Atlantic
- Christa Pike’s execution doctor speaks, New York
- How much do you know about sugar? New York Times
- CDC scientists sought urgent alert on measles in pregnancy. It wasn’t approved, The Washington Post
Source: www.statnews.com
