Methods
This narrative review was conceived as part of an undergraduate research project between the University of Leeds and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In order to determine epidemiological data on prescription drug use in ART, a search was conducted in PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane CENTRAL register of controlled trials with the following key words: (i) ‘In-vitro fertilisation’,, ‘ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection)’ ‘Artificial reproductive techniques’ ‘ART’; and (ii) ‘medications’, ‘therapeutics’, ‘drugs’, ‘prescription’ and ‘treatment’ in. Papers that were written in non-English languages were not included. These results enabled us to understand the most common drugs utilised by men and women having ART and subsequently, to determine evidence of these specific drugs in a context of ART, a search was conducted independently by ER and AS with the following key words: (i) ‘In-vitro fertilisation’, , ‘IVF’, ‘Artificial reproductive techniques’, ‘ART’, ‘Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection’, ‘ICSI’ and specific drug groups discussed below and which have been tabulated in table 2. We primarily focussed on articles which described one medication as a prescription for a pre-existing medical condition in the 6 months prior to ART treatment as the exposure, and clinical pregnancy. and live birth as the outcome. Articles, which focussed on prescription medication deliberately prescribed in order to influence ART outcome, were excluded.