Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) discovered that women who had a history of infertility had a 16 percent higher risk of heart failure compared to those who did not.
The study was just published in the April 26 issue of Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Cardiac arrest, which affects over 6 million people and results in over 1 million hospital admissions annually in the United States, is a serious public health issue.
Researchers from the Women’s Health Initiative monitored postmenopausal women for the onset of heart failure as part of the study. At the study’s beginning, infertility was self-reported.
Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction are the two kinds of the condition (HFrEF). 5,399 (14%) of the 38,528 postmenopausal women in the study—who had a mean age of 63 7 years—reported having had infertility in the past. 2,373 people experienced incident heart failure over a median follow-up of 15 years, including 807 people with HFrEF and 1,133 people with HFpEF.
Infertility was independently linked to a higher overall risk of heart failure in the future.
Notably, infertility was linked to a future risk of HFpEF but not HFrEF when looking at HF subtypes. Heart failure incidents were highly correlated with infertility. This proved to be unrelated to conventional cardiovascular risk factors and other disorders associated with infertility and was caused by an increased risk of HFpEF, but not HFrEF.
The mechanisms underlying the association between infertility and HFpEF should be the subject of future study. They draw the conclusion that further research is required to determine the mechanisms underlying the association between infertility and heart failure.
This is because it did not appear that the association could be explained by conventional cardiovascular risk factors, ischemic heart disease, or factors related to infertility.
Parvathy Sukumaran 
