Correlation between CFTR variants and outcomes of ART in patients with CAVD in Central China

Biallelic variants in Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) are the main pathogenic factor of congenital absence of the vas deferens (CAVD), including congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens (CBAVD) and congenital unilateral absence of the vas deferens (CUAVD). However, there are few reports about the correlation between CFTR variant and outcomes of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in CAVD patients of China. In this study, 104 patients with CAVD were recruited in Central China, and provided gene detection by the whole-exome sequencing, among them 69% (72/104) carried at least one variant in CFTR and one carried adhesion G protein-coupled receptor G2 (ADGRG2) variant. A total of 81 CAVD patients were treated with ART, of which 21 and 60 carried none or at least one variant in CFTR, respectively. The fertilization rate, cleavage rate, effective embryo rate, implantation rate, clinical pregnancy rate and live birth rate per fresh embryo transfer were compared between patients with and without CFTR variants. It was found that the ART outcomes had no significant difference whether the patients carried the CFTR variant or not. In addition, all of the offspring were healthy after follow-up. In conclusion, rare CFTR variants may play a major role in patients with CAVD in Central China, which were greatly different from other descent. There was no significant difference in ART outcomes in CAVD patients with or without CFTR variants. The limitations of this study were that there was no statistical analysis of the sperm quality through TESA and conclusions were relatively limited due to the small sample size of the study.