History of infertility tied to midlife women’s cardiovascular health

Key takeaways:

• Overall, biomedical and blood biomarker CV health scores were lower for women with vs. without infertility history.
• Behavioral scores were not significantly different for women with history of infertility

Infertility history was associated with lower overall and biomedical cardiovascular health scores among women who had a singleton birth, according to cohort study results published in JAMA Network Open.

“Increasing evidence indicates that reproductive traits may serve as markers for future cardiometabolic health. Advancing age is the primary factor associated with declining female fertility, particularly approaching age 40 years,” Amy R. Nichols, PhD, MS, RD, research fellow in the departments of nutrition and population medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and colleagues wrote. “Furthermore, early infertility may indicate underlying pathophysiology associated with later cardiometabolic outcomes.”

Nichols and colleagues conducted Project Viva, a prospective cohort study with 468 pregnant women (mean age, 50.6 years) enrolled from 1999 to 2002. All women had singleton live births in Boston. Researchers collected infertility history during a midlife visit from 2017 to 2021, approximately 18 years after study enrollment. Researchers evaluated associations between infertility history and mean American Heart Association Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) total, behavioral, biomedical and blood biomarker scores, wherein higher scores indicate better CV health.

Overall, 34.2% of women experienced infertility. Mean overall LE8 scores were 76.3, mean behavioral scores were 76.5, mean biomedical scores were 76 and mean blood biomarker scores were 78.9.

Among women with vs. without infertility history at midlife, the estimated overall LE8 score was 2.94 points lower, the biomedical score was 4.07 points lower and the blood biomarker score was 5.98 points lower. The behavioral score for the LE8 was also lower by 1.81 points among women with vs. without a history of infertility, but this was not statistically significant.

“Our results provide additional weight to evidence suggesting inclusion of infertility history in assessing risk among female patients and demonstrate the importance of early identification and invocation of ongoing cardiovascular preventive strategies,” the researchers wrote.