While obesity and its links to diabetes, heart disease and chronic health complications are often highlighted, its impact on women's fertility is not emphasised enough. In fact, obese women are three times more likely to suffer infertility than women with a normal body mass index, especially because obesity causes hormonal imbalances and problems with ovulation.
Obesity is now a major problem globally, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts there will be over 2.3 billion overweight and 700 million obese individuals by the end of 2016. The UAE, in particular, has a very high incidence of obese people, with a study by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation revealing that more than 66 per cent of men and 60 percent of women here are already overweight or obese. Fortunately, there is ever growing evidence today to show that weight loss surgeries can increase fertility in women. Obesity adversely impacts fertility and IVF outcomes through a variety of mechanisms. Bariatric surgery has been shown to improve menstrual cyclicity in anovulatory women, which probably explains why more than 80 percent of bariatric procedures are performed on women, and approximately half of these are performed in reproductive aged women. The increased risk of miscarriage in obese women may also decline after bariatric surgery.
Moreover, findings of a new study suggest that women who have gone through weight loss surgery were less likely to suffer from diabetes during pregnancy. For this study, Kari Johansson, a nutritionist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and colleagues compared the pregnancies of almost 600 women who gave birth after undergoing bariatric surgery, and over 2,300 women with the same BMI who did not have the surgery, using data from Swedish health registries.
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