The INFERTILITY project has published five scientific papers so far during the project period and several additional papers are underway. The published papers include two papers which compared the risk of cardiovascular disease according to underlying infertility (defined as prolonged time-to pregnancy) among men and women in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study and the Trøndelag Health Study, respectively. The findings from these two papers support an increased risk of cardiovascular disease among infertile women, with some heterogeneity observed across subgroups of cardiovascular disease, while there was only modest evidence of an increased risk among infertile men. Two other published papers use genetic variants associated with body-mass index and smoking in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study to study their effect on infertility. We observed robust evidence of a non-linear relationship between body-mass index and infertility in both sexes, with a substantial increased risk of infertility among overweight and obese individuals, while there was no evidence to support a relationship between smoking and infertility. Results from these and ongoing papers have been presented at both international and national conferences. This includes invited presentations. Finally, we have published one study indicating no difference in the risk of cardiovascular disease between women who delivered with and without the use of assisted reproductive technologies.
In addition, the project has contributed with results from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study and the Trøndelag Health Study to two large meta-analyses of cardiometabolic health (body-mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol etc.) trajectories of offspring conceived by assisted reproductive technologies, indicating no great differences in these measures according to mode of conception, which is reassuring to parents who require assistance to conceive.
