Is a long period without childbirth a risk factor for developing endometriosis?

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AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07

In symptom-free women undergoing sterilization, a longer period since the last childbirth was associated with an increased risk of developing endometriosis.

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Abstract

Endometriosis was found in 42 (20%) of 206 symptom-free, parous Norwegian women with a mean age of 37 years at the time of sterilization. Case-control analysis between the 42 women with endometriosis and the 164 without endometriosis revealed an increased risk of endometriosis with increasing number of years since the last childbirth. After 10 years without a birth, the odds ratio for endometriosis was 4.5 compared with the first 5 years after the last delivery. An increased risk of endometriosis with increasing age of the women could not be detected. If these findings from women with voluntary infertility are transferred to women with endometriosis associated with involuntary infertility, endometriosis could be a consequence of a long period without childbirth. This might explain why endometriosis is often diagnosed in infertile women.

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Condition tags

mesh:D004715endometriosisinfertility

MeSH descriptors

Endometriosis Adult Endometriosis Endometriosis Female Humans Infertility, Female Infertility, Female Middle Aged Risk Factors Statistics as Topic Sterilization, Tubal Time Factors

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

Cited by (44)

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europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-04T01:30:01.192114+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:11:54.876058+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK