Crowdsourced Health Confirms Infertility-Asthma Finding
CureTogether Data Reveals Link Between Self-Reported Infertility and Asthma
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Announced at Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Conference on September 15: 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 1.2 – 3.1.
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About CureTogether
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CureTogether has been called “Yelp for health.” It is a collaboration of people from around the world volunteering to solve real problems in chronic conditions. Patients self-report and rate symptoms and treatments for over 360 conditions. The top conditions at CureTogether are depression, anxiety, migraine, back pain, and vulvodynia. More information is at http://www.curetogether.com.
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Infertility-Asthma Research
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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
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More discoveries will be coming out in the coming weeks. Please comment if you have any questions or ideas, and have a wonderful day!
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September 16th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Alexandra,
It’s very exciting to see early results from analysis derived from “crowdsourced” data. Great example of the emerging field of “infodemiology” (see my website).
Regards,
Janice
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] 2009 Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0. trackback CureTogether just reported that they revealed a link between self-reported infertility and asthma: Patients at CureTogether [...]
September 29th, 2009 at 4:45 am
Treating through IVF
http://www.infertility-blog.com/2009/09/treating-through-ivf/
October 14th, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] studies. They have shown two examples of this such as in the case of the relationship between infertility and asthma, and most recently, the relationship between migraine and [...]
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