Mother's arm cradles an hour-old baby girl.

By Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter

SATURDAY, May 5 (HealthDay News) -- Birth defects are more common after certain infertility treatments, but whether the cause is the assisted reproduction techniques themselves or the underlying biology preventing conception isn't clear, Australian researchers say.

"While treatments appear quite safe, we cannot ignore that there are significant risks that require urgent investigation with additional ongoing studies," said lead researcher Michael Davies, an associate professor at the Robinson Institute of the University of Adelaide.

For the study, published online May 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Davies and colleagues collected data on more than 6,100 births achieved using assisted reproductive technology in South Australia.

[Read: Can't Get Pregnant?How Stress May Be Causing Your Infertility.]

The investigators compared these births with a registry of more than 300,000 births, looking for the risk of birth defects associated with infertility treatments compared to unassisted pregnancies. "Spontaneous" pregnancies in women who previously had infertility treatments were also considered.

Overall, with assisted reproduction methods, the risk of any birth defect was 8.3 percent compared with 5.8 percent for unassisted pregnancies. These included cleft palate, and heart, gastrointestinal and esophageal defects.

For in vitro fertilization (IVF), the risk for birth defects was 7.2 percent. For intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), it was 9.9 percent. In IVF, eggs are retrieved from a woman's ovaries and fertilized by sperm in a lab before being returned to her uterus. With ICSI, a form of IVF, a single sperm is injected into the center of an egg cell to aid fertilization.

Women using clomiphene citrate at home to stimulate ovulation had triple the risk of birth defects, the researchers noted.

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Birth Defect Rates Vary Depending on Fertility Treatment