Reasons For Infertility That Could Be Entirely in Your Control
There are many reasons for infertility and impaired fertility among women. PCOS, diabetic complications, high blood pressure, and other medical factors are considered to be high ranking causes for infertility. Therapy for many of these disorders often include lifestyle management including control of diet and exercise, as well as addressing issues of alcohol consumption, smoking and other forms of environmental chemical exposure.
Understanding the reasons for lifestyle management can increase the ability of patients to conform to these therapies. Knowing that exercise and conception can be directly related, or that both fertility and the ability to carry a child to term are affected by alcohol can make it easier for a patient to cooperate with treatments that otherwise might seem atypical, extremely challenging and a little off the point.
For many patients the reasons for infertility appear unclear. Without understanding the role that exercise plays in the body’s hormone regulation, or understanding the role hormone regulation plays in the production of a fertile egg, the advice given by fertility professionals can appear vague or superstitious. This insecurity alone can increase the stress faced by couples and individuals attempting to conform to medical instruction.
Exercise and conception are linked through the subtle mechanisms of hormone control and overall wellbeing. A woman’s body is unprepared to establish a stable pregnancy when in poor condition, and is further forced into an overall lack of preparedness for pregnancy by the very problems associated with lack of exercise. The issues can become a decaying spiral of interrelated problems, each providing a roadblock to fertility.
Being overweight or underweight, both of which alter the body’s response to insulin, and which shift hormone production, are vital aspects of successful conception. Both can cause female hormone production to slow or stop, and can provoke high levels of male androgens which may overbalance the female hormones. This alone can establish a fundamental obstruction to pregnancy. Again exercise and conception are linked – a healthy exercise program helps control appetite, balance insulin production, and contributes to an adequate level of hormonal fitness.
Thus infertility therapies often begin with the basics of health. Diet, exercise management, attention to blood pressure and insulin resistance, lack of alcohol intake and smoking, none of which appear directly related to the reasons for infertility, are all core concerns for the professional providing care and treatment. Along with the arsenal of in vitro fertilization, egg harvesting, fertility drugs, and more, these basic health care approaches provide fundamental ways of helping women and their partners conceive and produce healthy offspring.
By understanding the underlying reasons for infertility these particular lifestyle changes begin to make more sense. Good health and good personal care are not always the ultimate solution to problems of infertility. However, they absolutely create the best health environment in which all other future treatments should occur. When health and exercise are addressed first, the way is prepared for optimal success in overall treatment of infertility and for fertility management.
When a patient is in glowing good heath, well nourished and well exercised, her body at its own peak of potential, she is also at her prime level of natural fertility. Other issues may need to be addressed – there remain very real challenges to pregnancy not included in basic wellbeing. But by ensuring basic wellbeing all other issues become simpler and more likely to respond to therapy.