CureTogether Data Confirms Link Between Self-Reported Infertility and Asthma
CureTogether, the volunteer collaboration project where participants report on their own medical symptoms, is reporting that they’ve confirmed a link between self-reported infertility and asthma. Here’s some excerpts from their press release:
Patients at CureTogether who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.
This comes from an analysis of 324 patients. Within the 34 people reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining 21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the 290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma (the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma).
This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.4 – 2.6.
The importance of this finding is that using only self-reported data, we have confirmed the infertility-asthma association that has previously been explored only in clinical studies:
1. Asthma was found to be associated with irregular menstruation. http://thorax.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/6/445
2. Asthma is higher in women with endometriosis (which also has a high correlation to infertility) than in the general population. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/10/2715
3. The more siblings you have, the less likely you are to have asthma. http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/209
4. A big cohort study in the UK found no link between fertility and allergy-related diseases but also said that with asthma in particular there was a different relationship to fertility than with eczema and hay fever. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/165/9/1023#FIG1
The announcement was made yesterday at the Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Symposium. You can see the presentation made by Alexandra Carmichael by visiting the symposium web site. In the videos at the top, scroll down to the fourth presentation by Carmichael, which is also an excellent overview of the CureTogether and The Quantified Self efforts.
Links:
CureTogether
The Quantified Self
