A recent study suggests that childlessness throughout adulthood may be linked to childhood illnesses in some cases.
Childlessness isn't just about fertility. A press release from the University of Oxford on the study states that "a variety of social, economic and personal preferences have been studied" to understand why some adults never become parents.
Lead author Liu Aoxing explained in a press release: "A variety of factors are driving the increase in childlessness globally, and delaying childbearing is one of the important factors, which may increase the risk of involuntary childlessness. ”
Do certain childhood illnesses play a role?
The research team was led by Dr. Liu, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland. The team tried to find out the answer to the question.
The researchers scrutinized data on more than 2.5 million Finnish men and women born between 1956 and 1973. By 2018, most of them had completed their "reproductive years".
The Liu group focused on about 71,500 pairs of full sisters and nearly 78,000 pairs of full brothers, one of whom was childless and the other had one or more children.
The study found that by 2018, one in four people in the Finnish cohort was childless, compared to 16 among women6%。According to the study, education is the number one factor in childlessness, and Finns who don't have much education are less likely to have no children.
However, certain childhood illnesses also appear to increase the chances of becoming childless in adulthood. A review of 414 early diagnoses found that 74 diseases were significantly linked to the fate of whether a person would grow into a childless adult.
About half of the respondents were classified as "mental-behavioral" with mental illness, but the extent to which they were affected by different genders varied, Liu said. Studies have found, for example, that psychosis and a history of acute alcoholism in childhood have a greater impact on male infertility than women.
Non-psychiatric illnesses or conditions in childhood also play a role in childlessness later in life. For women, there is a link between obesity diagnosed as a teenager (rather than as adulthood) and becoming childless.
Childhood illnesses associated with diabetes, as well as birth defects, are more likely to cause childlessness in women than in men.
Autoimmune and inflammatory diseases diagnosed in early life appear to generally increase the risk of childlessness.
What relationship?According to the press release, "The absence of a partner plays a significant role in the link between childlessness and illness, accounting for an estimated 29 percent of women."3% and an estimated 37 for men9%。"The study found that people who don't have children are twice as likely to be single as those who don't.
Among those who had formed a partnership, the Finnish team found that women had six different childhood illnesses and men had eleven different illnesses associated with childlessness.
Senior author Andrea Garner said the study "paves the way for a better understanding of how the disease causes involuntary infertility and the need for improved public health interventions". Ghana is the director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
His team acknowledges that more data is needed to determine who chose not to have children by choice and who can't have children due to infertility or other life factors.
The study was published Dec. 18 in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
More information. The American Institute for Family Studies has done a more in-depth study of the increase in the number of childless Americans.
*: University of Oxford press release, 18 December 2023.
Copyright 2023 Healthday. All rights reserved.