New Debate on Link Between Stress, Infertility
Feb-25-2011

Stress and infertility have long been linked, with stress sometimes blamed when a woman can't get pregnant naturally or with fertility treatments.
Now, a new report finds that a woman's stress levels don't adversely affect her chances of getting pregnant in a single fertility treatment cycle.
''A lot of people worry that their stress, anxiety, tension, and worry might reduce their chances of pregnancy with a specific treatment cycle, but there is no evidence of that," says researcher Jacky Boivin, PhD, a health psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales. Boivin's team evaluated the results of 14 previously published studies.
The researchers aren't saying stress never has an effect on fertility treatment, Boivin tells WebMD. "It could be stress has an impact on treatment, in that you give up sooner," she says. And stress can reduce quality of life during the fertility treatments, so she does urge women undergoing fertility treatments to reduce excess stress.
"All [the research] is saying is, whatever stress you are experiencing is not going to impact whether you get pregnant on that particular cycle," Boivin tells WebMD.
But U.S.-based experts, including Alice D. Domar, PhD, director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Boston, who has researched infertility, says the jury's still out on the stress and infertility link.
"I think it's way too early to say stress has no impact on outcome, or to say stress does have an impact," she says. The new report, she says, ''counters the majority of the research."

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