(ANSA) – ROME, SEPTEMBER 10 – Women treated for asthma are at increased risk of miscarriage and needing fertility treatments to get pregnant, according to a large study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Vienna by Anne Vejen Hansen of Copenhagen University Hospital. However, the study also suggests that most women with asthma are able to have children.
Asthma is common among women of reproductive age. Previous studies have shown that women with asthma take longer to get pregnant. The team analyzed the reproductive outcomes of all Danish women born from 1976 to 1999, and followed them from 1994 to 2017. In total, 769,880 women were included and followed; anyone who regularly took asthma medications was classified as asthmatic. They found that women with asthma had a higher rate of fetal loss than those without asthma (17% versus 15.7%) and a higher use of fertility treatments (5.6% versus 5%). However, the rate of women who went on to give birth was 77% for both women with and without asthma, suggesting that asthma does not appear to affect the number of live births.
“We found that women with asthma had a higher rate of miscarriage and a higher use of fertility treatments. The more severe the asthma and the more acute episodes, the more likely they were to use fertility treatments,” Vejen Hansen explains. “It is not clear why this is the case, but it could be related to systemic inflammation throughout the body, including the reproductive organs.”
(ANSA).
2024-09-10 19:08:43