JBRA Assisted Reproduction 2015;19(1):1
EDITORIAL
doi: 10.5935/1518-0557.20150001
More than 5,000 participants (researchers, nurses, technicians and other professionals dedicated to advancing knowledge and expertise in reproductive biology) overall visited Honolulu early October 2014 for the 70th Annual Meeting of ASRM. Attended by more than 400 Latin American experts and over 180 Brazilians. Nearly 1,400 abstracts - with most contributors coming from the United States of America, China, Brazil, United Kingdom, Turkey, Spain, Japan and Italy-were submitted from overall 78 countries (Benjamim, 2014). Topic wise the most contributions were to Embryology (clinical), but also further main topics were Reproductive Endocrinology, Female infertility and Andrology, all for clinical applications more than for basic research. The 24 Postgraduate Courses were mostly visited for Reproductive Genetics, Early Pregnancy and Reproductive Endocrinology, and for Embryology.
A great moment of the Congress was the presentation of Professor Mats Brännström from Swedish. In a ground-breaking research project at the University of Gothenburg, seven Swedish women have had embryos reintroduced after receiving wombs from living donors. Now the first transplanted woman has delivered a baby – a healthy and normally developed boy. The world-unique birth was acknowledged in The Lancet on 5 October (Brännström et al., 2014). The uterus transplantation research project at the University of Gothenburg started in 1999 and has been evaluated in over 40 scientific articles. The goal of the Gothenburg project is to enable women who were born without a womb or who have lost their wombs in cancer surgery to give birth to their own children.
Several other prizes were awarded to congress participants: the best oral presentation on a basic science topic went to China. Continuous interest and research regarding the safety of ART lies in the follow up of association of ovarian stimulation and the longterm risk o developing hormone depending malignancies such as breast or ovarian cancer. According to Bert Scoccia from Chicago a 30 year follow up of nearly 10.000 women, who underwent infertility treatment from 1965 to 1988 at 5 US medical centers revealed only little evidence of an increased risk overall. In subdividing, a high risk for breast cancer was detected by administrating clomiphene citrate for 12 cycles or more. Gonadotrophins, were only associated with an elevated risk in a subgroup of women who remained unsuccessful with the treatment. Those long-term, retrospective studies with enough statistical power can only reveal subtle differences which warrant further intensive monitoring on the subject world wide.
The Distinguished Researcher Award from the ASRM is given to a scientist with a long record of important scientific achievement in the field of reproductive medicine. The 2014 recipient was Gautam Chaudhuri, M.D., Ph.D who serves as Executive Chair and Distinguished Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. After completing his medical training in India, he studied the role of prostaglandins in the mechanism of action of the intrauterine device under the mentorship of subsequent Nobel Laureate Sir John Vane. He was the first to formulate the hypothesis, since proven, as to how NSAIDs reduce uterine bleeding. After he joined the faculty at UCLA, he collaborated with the pharmacologist Lou Ignarro in the discovery of nitric oxide as the endothelium-derived relaxing factor. He has published 115 peer-reviewed papers that have advanced our understanding significantly of the factors that control vascular tone, the effects of estrogens on atherosclerosis, the biology of breast cancer and the etiology of pre-eclampsia.
Paulo Franco Taitson
JBRA Associate Editor
Chairman of Research Group Functional Anatomy of the Urogenital Apparatus - Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.
REFERENCES
Brännström M, Johannesson L, Bokström H, Kvarnström N, Mölne J, Dahm-Kähler P, Enskog A, Milenkovic M, Ekberg J, Diaz-Garcia C, Gäbel M, Hanafy A, Hagberg H, Olausson M, Nilsson L. Livebirth after uterus transplantation. Lancet. 2014. In Press.
Medline Crossref
Benjamim J. ASRM Office of Public Affairs. Washington: ASRM, October 19, 2014.