Infertility affects a large number of couples and individuals who are trying to conceive. New research suggests that a daily low dose of aspirin may increase chances of conception for women with chronic inflammation.
Infertility is largely defined as the inability to conceive or maintain a pregnancy to full term.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that 12% of US women of reproductive age are unable to become pregnant. Some of these women may have chronic, low-grade inflammation, which has been previously associated with causes of infertility.
New research - carried out by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a subdivision of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - investigates the effects of low-dose aspirin on pregnancy rate, pregnancy loss, births, and inflammation during pregnancy.
The findings, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, suggest that a low daily dose of aspirin may help women who have previously lost a pregnancy successfully carry a baby to term, medicalnewstoday.com reported.
Lindsey A. Sjaarda, Ph.D., who is a staff scientist in the NICHD Division of Intramural and Population Health Research, is the study’s first author.
Sjaarda and team examined the data available from the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction (EAGeR) trial. The original purpose of the trial was to test whether a small daily dose of aspirin could prevent further pregnancy loss for women who had already had one or two miscarriages.
EAGeR was a randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled trial carried out in four academic medical centers across the US. The trial gathered 1,228 healthy females aged between 18 and 40, who were actively trying to conceive at the time but had previously lost one or two pregnancies.
The participants were administered a daily dose of 81 milligrams of aspirin for up to six monthly cycles while they were trying to get pregnant, and for the entire gestation period of 36 weeks in women who did successfully conceive.
For the study, Sjaarda and colleagues divided these participants into three subgroups, according to how much C-reactive protein (CRP) they had in their blood.
CRP is a protein produced by the liver, which flares up when the body has an inflammation.
As part of the randomized trial, some of these women received aspirin and some a placebo.
In their analysis, researchers found that in the high CRP group, women who received placebo had the lowest live birth rate (44%) while women who took a daily dose of aspirin had a 59% rate of live births.
Therefore, women with high CRP levels benefited most from the aspirin treatment. In their case, the treatment resulted in a 35% increase in live births, compared with the placebo control group.
The authors conclude that more research is needed to replicate and confirm their findings.
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