The path to fertility care is further complicated by how doctors approach weight. Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine in Orono who is in a larger body, sought help with fertility after struggling to conceive for a year in 2014. The first doctor she saw, she says, told her, \u201cwhy don\u2019t you take a year, lose as much weight as you can, and then come back and we\u2019ll talk.\u201d They didn\u2019t even perform any tests.<\/p>\n
Gill, then 33, says she was offered no other guidance beyond diet and exercise. \u201cYou want people to be healthy,\u201d Santoro says, \u201cbut are we stressing women out by forcing them to lose weight and to go on a pretty rigorous weight-loss protocol that\u2019s actually not helping?\u201d GLP-1 drugs may offer a more effective alternative, she says, promoting weight loss with less psychological strain.<\/p>\n
Still, research remains scarce<\/a>. \u201cThere are zero. Let me repeat that, zero studies looking at the impact of GLP-1 receptor agonist, and anything related to fertility or menstruation and women without PCOS,\u201d says Zaher Merhi<\/a>, a reproductive endocrinologist with Rejuvenating Fertility Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Online, he notes, people often assume the drugs improve fertility. \u201cThere are anecdotal stories, \u2018Oh my friend took it and got pregnant the next month,\u2019 and stuff like that,\u201d he says. \u201cI think we’re craving something that’s really magical, right?\u201d<\/p>\n But studies of pregnancies and hormones aren\u2019t enough to prove a connection, he says. He wants to see \u201cthe ovarian function and egg quality, or uterine function and biopsy of the lining. I’m talking about the cellular level, not just the hormonal level.\u201d<\/p>\n Do GLP-1 drugs affect male fertility, too?<\/p>\n It is all too easy to focus entirely on female anatomy when thinking about fertility. But \u201cabout half the time there’s difficulties in an infertile couple, it is a male factor that’s leading that,\u201d says Michael Eisenberg<\/a>, a reproductive urologist at Stanford Medical School. Most conditions that harm overall health also affect male reproduction, he explains. Diabetes, for instance, can reduce semen quality and impair sexual function, while high blood pressure<\/a> can have similar effects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The path to fertility care is further complicated by how doctors approach weight. Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[64,63,137,490],"class_list":["post-264313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-medication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}