14 DAY TRIAL // A new study focusing on women in India, suggests that women with epilepsy are twice as likely as others to suffer from infertility.
The researchers also discovered that women who were taking several epilepsy drugs, had higher infertility risks than those taking fewer or no drugs at all.
Before drawing any conclusions, the researchers studied 375 women with an average age of 26 years, who were supposed to become pregnant, and followed their situation until they did become pregnant or for a period of up to 10 years.
During the study, 62% of women became pregnant while the rest remained infertile; the percentage is more than twice the infertility rate in India (15%).
Women that took three or more drugs for epilepsy, had 18 times less chances of having a baby, than those who were not taking any epilepsy drugs at all.
7% of women not taking epilepsy drugs were infertile, those taking one drug had a 32% infertility rate, 41% of women taking two epilepsy drugs were infertile as well as 60% of those taking three or more drugs.
Study author Sanjeev Thomas, DM, of the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in Trivandrum, India, said that “this may be due to the adverse effects of taking multiple drugs or it could be a more indirect effect because people who are taking multiple drugs are more likely to have severe epilepsy that is difficult to treat.”
Another criteria were age and education, as older women and those with less than 10 years of education, had higher risks of being infertile, and Thomas said that the link between lower education and infertility “could also be due to difficult-to-treat epilepsy, which may make completing additional years of education challenging”.
Most pregnancies occurred within the two years since the beginning of the study, so, as editorial author Alison M. Pack, MD, of Columbia University in New York says, “based on these findings, women with epilepsy should be counseled about the potential risk of infertility and referred for an evaluation if they have not conceived within two years.”
Regarding the drugs taken, those on phenobarbital had a significant infertility risk, while no such phenomenon was observed with valproate or other drugs.
This new research was published in the October 12, 2010, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.