A new research published in the journal Fertility and Sterility has suggestively linked mental health and fertility which it says could exist for women and men.
Women having trouble getting pregnant often try things like yoga, meditation or mindfulness, and do not realize that the mental state of the man could be the main problem.
The study involved data from 1,650 women and 1,608 men who were recruited through the National Institutes of Health's Reproductive Medicine Network at six sites in the United States.
Most of the participants were couples, and they were undergoing certain fertility treatment, such as ovarian stimulation medication or artificial insemination, but not in vitro fertilization. Based on a questionnaire, about 6 percent of the women and 2 percent of the men were rated as having major depression.
While the number of men with major depression in the analysis was small just 34 an analysis discovered differences between them and the other men in the study.
Those with major depression were 60 percent less likely to have a live birth than men who did not have major depression.
More specifically, of the 34, only three of the couples, or less than 9 percent, achieved a live birth. That compares with nearly 25 percent having a live birth for couples in which the male partner did not have major depression.
Researcher Esther Eisenberg of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and her co-authors theorized that there are many possible reasons male depression may interfere with fertility, including sexual dysfunction due to reduced libido, erectile dysfunction or delayed or inhibited ejaculation.
