Infertility and Its Associated Factors among Women Attending Selected Health Facilities in Boripe Local Government Osun State

Abstract

The extent to which women of reproductive age (15-49 years) experience infertility have not been fully explored in developing countries including Nigeria. Assessing the factors associated with infertility among infertile women can inform interventions to support their needs. This study was conducted to investigate the risk-factors of infertility among women in Boripe local government area (BLGA) of Osun State. A matched case-control study was conducted among infertile women attending the infertility clinic and fertile women attending ante-natal clinic in three health facilities namely: Ada health facility, Isale Oyo health facility and MDGs Oloti health facility in Boripe local government area in Osun state, Nigeria. Cases (n=135) were gotten from the infertility clinic across the three study facilities and controls (n=135) were the pregnant women attending the antenatal clinic in the three health facilities. Mean age was 29 ± 6.7 years, ranging from 16 to 47 years. Higher proportion of the infertile women (72.6%) had primary infertility, and a lot (35.9%) were not on treatment. Associated factors were partners’ age (p=0.007), income (p=0.067), age at menstrual debut (p=0.049), mental wellbeing (p=0.006). Factors associated with the likelihood of infertility were age at menstrual debut (>=15 years) (OR: 2.69, 95%CI: 1.07-6.75) in relative to age at menstrual debut (< 15 years). This study revealed a high prevalence of primary infertility, income, dietary habit and age at menstrual debut were associated with the likelihood of infertility. Much attention towards improving knowledge about factors influencing infertility such as dietary habit and early treatment for teenagers who have late menstrual debut will be helpful in reducing burden of infertility. Also, this study revealed that majority of the infertile women was not on treatments. This suggests that, it is likely that most of them were not seeing a pregnancy counselor. The role of pregnancy counseling on infertility should be appropriately explored in further studies.