AB084. The fertility quality of life (FertiQol) in Chinese infertile women

Objective: Infertility is defined as the failure to achieve clinical pregnancy after twelve months of regular unprotected sexual intercourse. In recent years, there is a rising trend of infertility in China, data shows that every eight couples have a pair of infertility, and the number of Chinese infertility patients has more than 50 million. Female infertility has various negative impacts on quality of life. In the past, various generic measurement tools were used for assessing Qol in infertile patients. Recently, a specifically Qol tool designed for infertile couples, has been developed and used internationally—The Fertility Quality of life(FertiQol)-questionaire. To the best of our knowledge, there was no published data regarding the general Qol in infertile women in mainland china. Our goal of this study is to understand the preliminary level of Qol in infertile women in mainland china, secondary aims was to compare Qol in women with primary and secondary infertility.

Methods: The FertiQol tool, a self-report questionnaire, was distributed to our department of Reproductive Center for infertile women who undergoing the treatment of in vitro fertilization from 2015.1 to 2015.4. Patients with primary and secondary infertility were compared for Qol subscales, and other confounding factors were investigated using multiple regression analysis.

Results: A total of 230 copies of eligible FertiQol questionnaires were collected, among them, 162 cases for primary infertility and 68 cases for Secondary infertility. The mean age of participants was 32.6±3.3 years and years of marriage was 4.2±1.3. Scores of mind-body (55.4), relational (57.4), environment (54.0), and tolerability (45.0) subscales in Chinese infertile women were lower than those (54.8, 68.7, 61.5 and 58.8) in western infertile women. According to the increase of infertility time, relational score (relation with husband) was decreased. Women with secondary infertility obtained higher scores in emotional, mind/body of the core subscale, and tolerability of the treatment subscale (P<0.05). Multiple regression analysis showed that the status of educational and secondary infertility had a positive impact.

Conclusions: FertiQol scores were better in patients with secondary infertility and higher educational status. This is the first validation study of mainland Chinese FertiQoL, and potentially used as a guide for clinical counseling and future works.

Keywords: The fertility quality of life (FertiQol); emotional; mind/body; relational; social; environment and tolerability; primary and secondary infertility