A new United States study is nothing less than a warning for women who lift heavy loads or work more than 8 hours a day.
According to the study, women who work for over 40 hours per week or lift heavy loads could take longer to conceive than women who do not work very hard.
Researchers included 1,739 nurses in the study. All the nurses were trying to conceive at the time of the study, which found that 16% did not achieve their target to get pregnant within one year, while 5% did not conceive even after 24 months, reports northerncalifornian.com.
The study found that women who worked over 40 hours a week took about 20% longer time to conceive than women who worked 21 to 40 hours a week. Lifting heavy loads or shifting them also delayed pregnancy. Lifting or moving about 25-pound loads many times a day has been found to delay pregnancy time by about 50%.
Audrey Gaskins, a researcher at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, said, “Our results show that heavy work, both in terms of physical strain and long hours, appears to have a detrimental impact on female nurses’ ability to get pregnant.”
Researchers analyzed data of women who participated in a nationwide survey of nurses between 2010 and 2014. About 50% of women were at least 33 years old and more than 30% women said they worked for more than eight hours a day, while 40% reported that they lift heavy loads.
Over the last 40 years, women are having fewer children, from 4.7 children per woman in 1970 to an average of 2.5 children today. Total fertility rates (TFRs) range from 1.1 in Taiwan to 7.4 in Niger.
In 1960, women worldwide had an average of 5 children. The rate has since halved, and in 2012, women had an average of 2.5 children across all regions.
The UN report attributes the slowdown to the near-global decline in fertility rates – measured as the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime – even in Africa, where the rates remain the highest.
It is said that there is an 80% probability that the population of the world will be between 8.4 and 8.6 billion in 2030, between 9.4 and 10 billion in 2050 and between 10 and 12.5 billion in 2100.
