Working outside the regular office hours, working irregular shifts and doing heavy lifting at work could lower a woman’s ability to conceive. These are the findings of the first study to ever examine the impact of workplace conditions on a woman’s biological capacity to have a baby. Researchers monitored a number of indicators in 473 women attending one fertility clinic. They looked at the number of remaining eggs and levels of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), as well as the number of mature eggs capable of developing into a healthy embryo through IVF, in about one-third of the cases. Their findings showed that women working physically demanding jobs had a lower reserve of eggs and fewer mature eggs. The same trend held for women working irregular shifts, with especially pronounced effects in those women who worked evening and night shifts. Researchers say lower egg count among women who work outside of the regular hours may be related to a disrupted biological clock. Since this is an observational study, no cause-and-effect relationship can be concluded from these findings; as well, researchers note these results may not be generalizable to women who conceive naturally without medical assistance such as IVF.
Authors:
Lidia Mínguez-Alarcón, Irene Souter, Paige L Williams, Jennifer B Ford, Russ Hauser, Jorge E Chavarro, Audrey J Gaskins
Corresponding author:
Lidia Mínguez-Alarcón, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston; Email: lminguez@hsph.harvard.edu
Original paper published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine on February 7, 2017.
