Periodic Reporting for period 2 - INFERTILITY (Understanding the causal nature of the relationship between infertility and cardiovascular disease)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-07-01 do 2023-12-31
The findings from this project will clarify whether couples with infertility should be followed-up with regard to their cardiometabolic health, in order to initiate interventions early and prevent future cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, we will be able to provide evidence to support whether or not intervening on specific cardiovascular risk factors, such as for example smoking or body-mass index, can increase infertile couples’ chance of conceiving.
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.
Going forward, we will further evaluate the relationship between cardiovascular risk factors and infertility in a different study population (the Trøndelag Health Study). We will also evaluate the risk of cardiovascular disease according to the number and outcome of cycles of assisted reproductive technologies using a Norwegian registry linkage, following up on the Nordic study we have conducted comparing the risk among women who delivered with and without the use of assisted reproductive technologies. Furthermore, the project will identify genetic determinants of infertility, in addition to clarifying whether there is any genetic overlap between infertility and cardiovascular disease with might explain an association between infertility and cardiovascular disease. Finally, we will evaluate whether cardiometabolic health explains a clustering of fertility problems within families, by also investigating whether there are any differences in offspring cardiometabolic health trajectories according to parental infertility.