As if infertility wasn’t already emotionally devastating, a new study shows that women who are unable to have children are more likely to be alcoholics than women with children.
A study conducted by Dr. Birgitte Baldur-Felskov, an epidemiologist at the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre, found that women who suffer from infertility are more than twice as likely to be hospitalized for alcoholism than their childbearing counterparts.
Baldur-Felskov told the Telegraph:
“This is only the tip of the iceberg. We were only able to analyze the risk of severe psychiatric disorders resulting in hospitalization.”
The study analyzed data from 98,737 Danish women diagnosed with infertility between 1973 and 2008. The results, which were presented July 1 at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Istanbul, also included data for hospitalizations for schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and other mental disorders, in addition to alcoholism.
54 percent of the women in the study did end up having at least one baby after an average of 12.6 years, and nearly 5,000 of the women were hospitalized with some kind of psychiatric disorder after being diagnosed as infertile. Women who had gotten pregnant but were unable to carry a child to term had significantly higher hospitalization rates than women who had given birth.
