Fertility is a complicated phenomenon in the human body, and there are many different factors that determine your chances of successfully bringing a healthy child to term. It’s a smart idea to look at each of these factors in order to determine what your chances are, how safe it is for you to try, and what you can do to make the child-bearing process safer, easier, and have a higher chance of working smoothly. A few such factors include the following.
Age
Unfortunately, age plays a large role in fertility. The older you get, in general, the more difficult is to conceive and bear children without any complications, though there are marker point ages. For example, generally men and women don’t have any real trouble up into their 30s. But after the age of 35, problems start to occur. For example, the chance of having a child with autism goes up especially for men trying to have children after the age of 40. In some cases this can go up as much as 6 times. The dangers associated with women who are over 40 goes up considerably as well. This includes the danger of miscarriage, as well as complications that could endanger the health of the woman as well as that of the baby.
Nutrition
Another important factor regarding fertility is what you put into your body. For example, being too underweight can cause women to stop ovulating which obviously has a strongly negative effect on fertility in that conception becomes essentially impossible during that time. Being overweight can also strongly impact sperm count in a negative way. Other nutritional factors are also important, such as how healthy you eat.
Stress
Stress is one of those things that can negatively impact just about every single aspect of health, and fertility is no exception. For example, studies have shown that stress lowers sperm count as well as make it more likely that sperm will be abnormal and so less likely to result in offspring. In women, chronic stress can affect hormones and slow down or even prevent ovulation. Basically, your body doesn’t want to allocate resources to children if it thinks your environment is too stressful for that to be a good idea.
Smoking and Drinking
There are few factors that impact fertility stronger than these. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a condition that affects the intelligence of children, and it’s directly related to the drinking habits of pregnant women. The fact is that these activities both seriously lower fertility prospeets in both men and women, and even if birth is achieved, the likelihood for having a child with birth defects skyrockets if the mother was drinking or smoking during the pregnancy period. So this means that one of the best things you can do if you care about fertility, is quit drinking or smoking during pregnancy at the very least. And truthfully, it’s also one of the best things you can do for your health in general so there’s no real good reason to start up again after.
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Writer Biography
This is a guest post by Lindsey Mcmahon. She likes to travel, play and read in her free time. Her interests are entertainment, television, parenting and health but she is constantly extending her field of view to incorporate interesting news suggested to her by her readers. She currently works for California Cryobank a company involved with sperm banks donors.
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