Sometimes, hard work hardly pays. This is especially true if looked at from a woman’s perspective. This day and age of competitiveness and career consciousness has witnessed the sprouting of a sub species of women called ‘the superwomen’. From attending client meetings to showing up at a friend’s party, from being a terrific boss to a perfect homemaker, the superwoman does it all. While she excels and receives accolades for her feats, she also unknowingly becomes a victim of stress.
Stress is no longer occasional but is rather continuous and acute. Of the cascading and debilitating effects that stress has on various body functions, for a woman, the biggest hit is infertility. Infertility is an aftermath of stress-induced fluctuations of important hormones in a woman’s body. These hormones render the female body incapable of reproduction, as is explained in a research study from the University of Utah.
According to Professor Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, over-worked women lose female hormone- oestrogen (vital for conception) and gain androgens, which include smale testosterone hormones that are associated with strength, stamina and competitiveness. This hormonal shift causes women to lose their trademark curvaceous ‘hour-glass’ body shape to a straighter figure that is less conducive to childbearing. Could we expect anything different from male hormones?
A change in shape evidently affects a woman’s waist to hip ratio (WHR), a formula derived by dividing someone’s waist circumference by her hip measurement. Women with an ideal WHR of 0.7 (i.e., their waist is 70 per cent of their hip circumference) have been shown to have three times the propensity to get pregnant, thus linking this figure to optimal fertility. One 2004 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society suggested that women with hourglass figures had about 30 percent higher levels of the female reproductive hormone, estradiol, compared with other body shapes. But when Cashdan analysed the WHR of women from 37 different populations and cultures, she found their average WHR to be above 0.8 – a ratio that makes it harder to conceive. Stress changes how fat is distributed in a woman’s body. Therefore in women working in high-stress environments, stress hormone cortisol moves fat from hips to the waist, thereby making their figures more cylindrical.
It is a well-established fact that women who deliberately under eat to stay super skinny have compromised fertilities. Scientifically reasoned, too little body fat triggers a woman’s brain to switch off her body’s ability to reproduce by gradually restricting the flow of a hormone called leptin. Rose Frisch, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, categorised such women as ‘razor-thin borderline’, where a drop of just 3lbs can tip a normal-sized woman into infertility without her realising it. She may continue to menstruate, but might not ovulate during her cycle and further decline in body fat can lead to complete amenorrhoea (cessation of menstruation). It is therefore not tough to accept this hypothesis about hard working career women losing fertility.
In a research at Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta, Professor Sarah Berga of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics found that women who didn’t ovulate had excessive levels of the stress hormone cortisol present in their brain fluid, often due to trying to squeeze in too much work and exercise. “Your brain is hard to fool,” Berga says. “If you are under-eating, overworking and over-exercising, then the hypothalamus – the part of the brain that controls the release of hormones – keeps a running tally of what you are doing.”
Whether a woman becomes infertile due to stress at her workplace, or simply evades motherhood till such time her accomplishments are satisfactory as per her scale, the message is out and clear- even the very best fertility experts cannot reset the hands of the biological clock. “Those women who are at the top of their game could have had it all, children and career, if they wanted it,” suggests Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Infertility Association (A.I.A.). “The problem was, nobody told them the truth about their bodies.” If you don’t want to be the one staring at high school dropouts stroll through the mall with their babies in a buggy, taking your foot off the pedal, spending lesser time with stress and giving adequate time to make babies is vital to overcome this epidemic of childlessness in career conscious women.
Article by Snigdha Taduri for Biomed-ME