Daily dose of painkiller could help women become pregnant

TAKING a quarter of an aspirin tablet every day could help many women to get pregnant, a study suggests.

Small doses of the painkiller appear to give women with high levels of inflammation around their bodies a boost to their odds of conceiving, putting them on a level playing field with their peers. About a third of women could benefit from the treatment, scientists claim.

A team of researchers led by the United States National Institute of Child Health and Human Development tracked more than 1200 women who were trying to have a child. They split the women into three groups according to their level of systemic inflammation, a measure of how alert their immune systems were.

Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory drug, dampening the ‘‘cytokine storm’’ released by the body’s immune system when it is under stress.

For the group of women with the highest levels of systemic inflammation, a daily 81-milligram dose of aspirin was found to raise their chances of pregnancy by about a fifth. There are 325mg of aspirin in a typical adult tablet.

Robert Silver, professor of obstetrics at the University of Utah, who was involved in the project, said the findings were ‘‘promising but preliminary’’ and that he would not yet advise women to start taking aspirin purely on the basis of the new research.

‘‘We think this is probably due to local inflammation in gestational tissues rather than systemic inflammation,’’ he said.

Richard Paulson, the society’s vice-president and a fertility clinician at the University of Southern California, said he had long recommended aspirin to his patients.

‘‘Many people use it routinely, including in our clinic,’’ he said. ‘‘We ask them to take folic acid and aspirin.’’

Paulson said the new research added to the evidence that aspirin could be helpful to some women who had trouble conceiving.

The findings are the second wave of evidence from the NICHD team that aspirin could help some groups of women to conceive.

Women who had previously lost a pregnancy tended to have a better chance of giving birth if they took the drug, the scientists reported in The Lancet last year.

Stuart Lavery, a consultant gynaecologist at Hammersmith Hospital in London, warned women against relying too heavily on the findings.

Aspirin might actually harm the fertility of some women with low levels of systemic inflammation, he said.

‘‘I think we need to be slightly cautious. Aspirin is too blunt an instrument to recommend this to everybody.’’

Meanwhile, frequently smoking cannabis may improve men’s fertility by as much as 65 per cent, according to a study that defies medical orthodoxy.

Researchers at Boston University studied 510 couples who were trying for a baby. Men who smoked the drug frequently appeared to be much more likely to get their partner pregnant, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on women.

However, the scientists admitted that the number of regular cannabis users in the study was so small that the trends could be a statistical anomaly.