Question:
I have a question that I am not able to answer to. I was wondering if
you could help me answer it... Here it is : "Describe the misdeed (not
sure about that word, but I'm French!) of a long term stress on the
system and explain how this stress can affect the reproduction
conditions and how it prevents the conception."
So all I need to know is how stress is at the origin of infertility and
the way it works.
We tought that because long term stress tend to use all the lipids
available and since androgens are lipids with cholesterol, that was why
it lends to infertility.
Answer:
Stress does not cause infertility. Infertility causes stress. Short-term,
high-stress periods *can* inhibit fertility, but not for 10 years or more
(which is what many couples on this newsgroup have experienced). That kind of
stress would kill you.
In fact, stress causes some hormonal disturbance in the body which leads
to a malfunction in the spermatogenese and the ovulation, but I don't
know the hormone and I don't know how it works. And since stress causes
infertility, infertility causes stress and it continues like that...
I'm not sure if I understand your premise. Are you trying to establish
*if* stress prevents conception, or are you trying to establish *why*?
If the "why" is what you're after, I'd say that you'd first have to
establish the "if". Also, is psychological stress the only stress you're
examining?
As others here will tell you, in most cases of infertility, there is a
cleary established medical reason that pregnancy does not occur or
maintain, as the case may be. Most of the medical reasons couldn't
possibly have anything to do with emotional stress. Perhaps it would
be better to determine, through both meta-analysis of research that's
already been done on the topic and questionnaire what percentage of
infertility is not being caused by a diagnosable medical problem and
look at those cases for possible stress relationships. Of those
"unexplained" cases you'll also have to consider how many might be
caused by "combined" factors, such as the coupling of someone with
marginally low/normal sperm count with someone of marginal age related
egg quality.
Common sense tells me that pscyhological stress probably does not play
that large a role in the process of conception. After all, one only
needs to examine patterns of wartime births or births in impoverished
third world countries to conclude that it *can't* be that big of a
deterrent. Perhaps studying birth patterns in a whole society undergoing
pscyhological stressors, such as ones I've mentioned, might be more
enlightening than looking at the people who would be reading these
newsgroups.
You seem to be walking on a slippery slope. I think everyone here would
tell you that infertility *causes* stress. So, if you're looking at the
stress levels of infertiles, of course you're going to find it. What
you find is likely to be confounding to your data for the same reason.
Also, you have to be willing to quantify and qualify what you speak
about as being "stress". I don't think the problem can be simplified in
the way you suggest (by skipping the stage of establishment).
