Women With Asthma Have a Higher Risk of Miscarriage and Require Fertility Treatment

Women who are treated for asthma have a higher risk of miscarriage and require fertility treatment in order to become pregnant. This is the result of a large study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Vienna. However, the study also shows that most women with asthma are able to have a child.

The study was presented by Dr. Anne Vejen Hansen from the Department of Respiratory Medicine at Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark. She said: “Asthma is common in women of childbearing age. Previous studies have shown that women with asthma take longer to get pregnant than women without asthma when undergoing fertility treatment, and that asthmatic women who succeed in getting pregnant are more likely to have received fertility treatment than non-asthmatic women. However, most existing studies refer to women who have actually become pregnant, so the researchers wanted to examine fertility outcomes on a national level to include those who may not become pregnant at all.

Women With Asthma Could Have Potential Problems With their Family Planning

The team analyzed the reproductive outcomes of all Danish women born between 1976 and 1999 and followed them from 1994 to 2017. A total of 769,880 women were included and followed up. All women who regularly took medication for asthma were classified as asthmatic. They found that women with asthma were more likely to suffer fetal loss compared to women without asthma (17.0% vs. 15.7%) and more likely to seek fertility treatment (5.6% vs. 5.0%). However, the proportion of women with and without asthma who subsequently gave birth was 77%, suggesting that asthma does not appear to affect the number of live births.

The researchers found that women who met the definition of asthma had a higher rate of fetal loss and higher utilization of fertility treatments. The more severe the asthma and the more episodes the women had, the more likely they were to need fertility treatment. It is not clear why this is the case. It may be related to systemic inflammation throughout the body, including in the women’s reproductive organs. However, the figures also show that the same women who take asthma medication end up having just as many live births as women who do not.

This suggests that most women with asthma are likely to succeed in getting pregnant and having children. The researchers also plan to investigate the possible effects of male asthma on fertility and therefore have another similar registry-based study in preparation. However, the results also suggest that women with asthma should consider potential reproductive problems when planning their families. If women with asthma are concerned about their fertility, it would be advisable to speak to their doctor. The results of this study also underline the importance of treating asthma in women of childbearing age. The fact that fertility problems increase with the severity of asthma suggests that uncontrolled asthma is the problem and that we should help women to get their asthma under control.