How Do Unhealthy Lifestyles Affect Fertility?

Whenever you notice your effort to become parents is not fruitful, you think something is wrong with you or your partner. And you decide to see an expert at a fertility or IVF clinic in Bangalore or your locality. After going through your medical history and the reports of the recommended tests for your fertility assessment, the doctor discloses the root cause and suggests the most suitable and effective treatment. Along with treatment, the expert advises you to follow healthy lifestyles as your bad or unhealthy lifestyles were stopping you from having a conception. Here know how unhealthy lifestyle affects fertility:

Tobacco Use

Smoking or chewing tobacco can affect spermatogenesis, the development of sperm. Tobacco use has also been linked to lower sperm counts, movement disorders, and hormonal imbalances in men. Women who smoke are known to reach menopause earlier, which also increases female infertility. According to recent studies, passive smoking can also lead to infertility. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2015 that the prevalence of tobacco use in India is at 17% and India is known to have one of the highest prevalence of smokeless tobacco use.

Use of contraceptives

Prolonged use of oral contraceptives significantly influences women’s fertility potential. Birth control pills are known to cause hormonal imbalance in the body, making women's menstrual cycle irregular. It can sometimes take several months for ovulation to return to normal. According to a recent study, contraceptive use in India increased from 45% in 1988 to 59% in 2015.

Alcohol consumption

While the ill effects of excessive alcohol are many, fertility in men is affected in terms of reduced seminal quality, low testosterone levels, decrease in semen volume and sperm count, etc. Chronic alcohol consumption causes hormonal imbalance in women, causing irregular ovulation or an early menopause. Even moderate alcohol intake (~ 5 drinks/week) can impair conception.

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Environmental risks

Scientific evidence states that prolonged exposure to high mental stress, high temperatures, chemicals, radiations or to heavy electromagnetic or microwave emissions may reduce fertility in both men and women.

Underweight

Being underweight and having a body fat level that is 10-15% below normal can completely disable the reproductive axis and its functions.

Social risks

Delayed marriage and late conceptions in career-oriented women is associated with increased risks of non-conception, high chromosomal abnormalities, increased general health problems that interfere with fertility and increased risk of miscarriages. At 40 years, chances of pregnancy decrease to 90-67% and at 45 years the percentage decreases even more to less than 15%.

Certainly there are many other factors, including ethnicity, that lead to infertility apart from the above, and the given lifestyle risk factors result in assorted health problems apart from impaired fertility. Nonetheless, we need to understand that the problem of infertility is growing by leaps and bounds in the modern world, with an estimated 22-33 million Indian couples impacting the health of Indians. Therefore, we need to spread more information about infertility, its causes, appropriate actions to prevent it, and available infertility treatments.