Women who have undergone fertility treatment which has failed face growing mental health problems if they cannot deal with their yearning for children, researchers have warned.
The study in Cardiff, Wales, suggests it is the unfulfilled yearning for children that impacts on mental health when a woman remains infertile.
Dr Sofia Gameiro of Cardiff University, UK, and her team explored the factors that may affect women’s mental health over a decade after unsuccessful fertility treatment.
They gave questionnaires to 7,148 women who had previously received fertility treatment at 12 IVF hospitals in The Netherlands. Questionnaires were completed between 11 and 17 years after the treatment.
Most women said they had come to terms with the failure of their fertility treatment, but 6% still wanted children. This group were currently experiencing worse mental health.
"It was already known that people who have infertility treatment and remain childless have worse mental health than those who do manage to conceive with treatment," said Dr Gameiro.
"However, most previous research assumed that this was due exclusively to having children or not, and did not consider the role of other factors. We found that women who still wished to have children were up to 2.8 times more likely to develop clinically significant mental health problems than women who did not sustain a child-wish.
"The strength of this association varied according to whether women had children or not. For women with no children, those with a child-wish were 2.8 times more likely to have worse mental health than women without a child-wish. For women with children, those who sustained a child-wish were 1.5 times more likely to have worse mental health than those without a child-wish.
"This link between a sustained wish for children and worse mental health was irrespective of the women’s fertility diagnosis and treatment history."
Full details of the study are published in the journal Human Reproduction.
Gameiro, S. et al. Do children make you happier? Sustained child-wish and mental health in women 11-17 years after fertility treatment. Human Reproduction 10 September 2014 doi:10.1093/humrep/deu178
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