Impacting Even Affluent Neighborhoods: Where You Live Can Affect Your Ability To Conceive



According to a recent Oregon State University study, women who live in areas with lower socioeconomic mobility have a 20% lower chance of becoming pregnant at any given time than women who live in areas with more resources.

The study evaluated "fecundability," or the chance of getting pregnant on a monthly basis, among couples trying to get pregnant naturally.

Researchers compared neighborhoods using the "area deprivation index" score, which is a gauge of a neighborhood's socioeconomic resources. They found that even within a reasonably well-off, highly educated research population, fecundity rates were lower in less affluent neighborhoods than in more affluent ones.

"Research on fertility is starting to look at elements related to the built environment. The pre-conception period is structurally understudied, according to lead author Mary Willis, a postdoctoral scholar in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences. "There are dozens of studies looking at how your neighborhood environment is associated with poor birth outcomes, but the pre-conception period is heavily under-studied," she said. It turns out that factors could effect your health even before conception.

The idea that the ZIP code is the best predictor of total life expectancy based on factors such as income, education level, access to clean water, employment rates, and health care have both been highlighted by public health studies in the previous 10 years.

But there hasn't been much research done on the idea that your area influences your fertility, according to Willis. Additionally, since most infertility research focuses on specific individual characteristics, when I entered this project as an environmental epidemiologist, I believed that we should consider infertility as a structural issue.

Data from Boston University's continuing pregnancy research, the Pregnancy Study Online, were used in the study (PRESTO). Data collected from 2013 to 2019 were used to evaluate a cohort of 6,356 people, aged 21 to 45, who were attempting to become pregnant without the aid of fertility treatment.

Every eight weeks for up to a year, study participants responded to online surveys asking about the characteristics of their menstrual cycles and whether or not they were pregnant. 3,725 pregnancies in the research period were recorded.

Researchers examined socioeconomic characteristics such as educational attainment, housing, employment, and poverty to compare participants across various area deprivation index rankings on a national and state-by-state basis.         
According to national rankings, they discovered that participants in the poorest neighborhoods had a 19–21% lower rate of fecundity than those in the wealthiest areas. The most impoverished neighborhoods experienced a 23-25% decrease in fecundability in comparison to the least impoverished areas, according to rankings within states.

The same outcomes at the national and state levels clearly demonstrate that neighborhood disadvantage can affect reproductive health, including fertility, according to Willis.

Because fertility treatments are expensive and typically only available to couples with significant wealth, she suggested that looking at fertility studies from a structural perspective could assist reduce or prevent infertility in general.

The study comes to the conclusion that efforts to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in underprivileged areas may have a favorable impact on reproduction.

By OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY 

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