Quality of Life and Its Influencing Factors of Couples Referred to An Infertility Center in Shiraz, Iran

Infertility has an adverse effect on Quality of Life (QoL). The present study aimed to evaluate QoL and its effective factors in infertile couples.
Fertility Quality of Life (FertiQoL) Instrument was used to measure QoL among 500 volunteer couplesattending the infertility clinic of Mother and Child Hospital in Shiraz, Iran. The participants’ demographic and clinical characteristics were assessed by an additional questionnaire. Finally, QoL was measured and the confounding factors related to QoL were investigated through multiple regression analysis.
The subjects with lower income levels obtained lower relational, mind/body, emotional, and total core scores. In addition, the female participants without academic education gained lower scores in the emotional subscale, while the male participants showed lower scores in emotional, mind/body, relational, social, and total QoL domains. Moreover, the subjects who had undergone any type of treatment, including pharmacological treatment, Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), showed significantly lower scores in the environmental domain. On the other hand, the participants with lower infertility duration obtained significantly greater QoL scores. Finally, tolerability, emotional, and environmental domains were significantly more desirable when the infertility problem was related to a male factor. All the tests were conducted at the 5% significance level.
QoL was higher in the infertile couples with a male factor. On the other hand, the infertile couples with lower income levels, without academic education, and those who had undergone any kind of treatment had lower QoL.