Having a Baby: Stress Doesn’t Hamper Fertility Treatment, Researchers Conclude
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Women taking fertility treatments can relax, researchers say: Despite the common wisdom, being worried or tense does not affect one’s chances of becoming pregnant.

British researchers reviewed 14 prospective studies from 10 countries covering 3,583 infertile women who underwent a cycle of fertility treatments. Many studies on the subject with widely varying methodologies have been done, but this review, published online in BMJ, considered only those that rated emotional distress before treatment, and compared the rates in women who did and did not become pregnant afterward.

There is no question that fertility treatment can be stressful, and according to background information in the article, 30 percent of couples stop treatment because of the psychological burden. But no matter how they looked at the data, the researchers could find no association between high emotional stress and failure of the completed fertility treatment cycle.

The authors acknowledge that their review could not exclude the possibility that some biological mechanism connecting stress to fertility might be found using other methods or studying different populations.

But the lead author, Jacky Boivin, a professor of health psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, said stress was probably not the problem for women trying to conceive. “Dealing with stress,” she said, “should be more about improving people’s quality of life rather than improving their chances of conception.”