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. 2019 Sep 4;19(1):114.
doi: 10.1186/s12905-019-0805-3.

An investigation of the effects of infertility on Women's quality of life: a case-control study

Katayoun Bakhtiyar  1 , Ramin Beiranvand  1 , Arash Ardalan  2 , Farahnaz Changaee  3 , Mohammad Almasian  4 , Afsaneh Badrizadeh  5 , Fatemeh Bastami  6 , Farzad Ebrahimzadeh  7
Affiliations

An investigation of the effects of infertility on Women's quality of life: a case-control study

Katayoun Bakhtiyar et al. BMC Womens Health. .

Abstract

Background: Human instinctively desire to have offspring. Infertility can cause painful emotional experiences throughout the life mainly known as quality of life impairment. This study aimed to investigate the impact of infertility on a woman's quality of life.

Methods: A number of 180 infertile and 540 fertile women participated in this matched case-control study. The cases were selected through a combination of multistage stratified and cluster sampling methods. For each infertile woman three fertile women were randomly selected. The data gathering instrument consisted of demographic variables and the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. Data collection was conducted through interview with participants. The multivariate marginal model and SPSS software 21 were used for data analyses with a significance level of 0.05.

Results: The results of the multivariate modeling show infertility can potentially affect various aspects of women's quality of life such as physical health (p < 0.001), mental health (p < 0.001), social health (p < 0.001) and the total score of quality of life (p < 0.001) significantly.

Conclusion: An infertile woman practice a relatively lower scores in QOL sub-scales of mental, physical and environmental health; while they experience a higher social health score than a fertile woman.

Keywords: Infertility; Iran; Quality of life; WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors have read and approved the content of the article. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The mean scores of different dimensions of life quality among fertile and infertile women
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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