Asthma is a chronic condition that impacts health more than just the lungs. A new study has revealed that asthma in women increases the risk of miscarriage and fertility issues.
Women undergoing treatment for asthma are more likely to experience miscarriage and require fertility treatment to conceive compared to those without asthma, according to the study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Vienna, Austria.
However, the study also found that after fertility treatment, the number of live births was the same for women with or without asthma, suggesting the condition does not impact the overall chances of having a successful pregnancy.
"We found that women fulfilling the definition of asthma had a higher rate of fetal loss and an increased use of fertility treatment. The more severe the asthma and the more flare-ups the women experienced, the more likely they were to need fertility treatment. Why this is, is not clear. It might be related to systemic inflammation throughout the body, including women's reproductive organs," Dr. Anne Vejen Hansen, the researcher who presented the study, said in a news release.
Earlier research suggests that women with asthma take longer to conceive when undergoing fertility treatment, and those who succeed are more likely to have achieved it after fertility treatment. However, since most of these studies focused only on women who eventually became pregnant, the current study examined the impact of asthma on fertility using national scale data.
For this, researchers analyzed the reproductive outcomes of 769,880 women born in Denmark between 1976 and 1999. They were followed up for around 20 years from 1994. The participants who regularly used anti-asthma medication were considered asthmatic.
"They found that women with asthma experienced a higher degree of fetal loss compared to women without asthma (17.0% vs. 15.7%) and more use of fertility treatment (5.6% vs. 5.0%). However, the proportion who subsequently gave birth was 77% in women with and without asthma, suggesting that asthma does not seem to affect the number of live births," the news release stated.
As the findings suggest that the severity of asthma can impact fertility, the researchers stress the importance of effective asthma control to improve reproductive outcomes in women.
