Environmental Contaminants and Infertility: Hypoth-esis or Cause for Concern

Background: Infertility is a unique feature in epidemiology; as it involves a couple (instead of just one person), it may remain asymptomatic if the couple do not seek for children, it involves a spectrum (in terms of etiology and severity), and it has a wide variety of definitions (clinical, epidemiological and demographic). Both genetic and environmental/life style factors are suspected to have a role in producing this disorder. Environmental factors are victimized to cause many communi-cable and non-communicable disorders. It is estimated that one forth to one third of the global burden of diseases are attributed to environmental factors. We searched medical literature in or-der to know whether there is any conclusive relation between environmental factors and infertility.Materials and Methods: Keyword related to fertility or infer-tility; and environment or pollution were looked in Pubmed and Scopus. No language limitation were imposed. Then the results were limited to systematic reviews and the papers that has been published recently (last 4 years). All titles have been reviewed to find the relevant clinical/epidemiological studies. Finally all abstracts –and if needed full text papers- were reviewed com-pletely. The factors were classified based on their similarity in terms of chemical property and the results of similar studies were compared.Results: We found 699 (scopus) and 185 (Pubmed) papers in the first step. All pubmed papers were included in scopus, so we continued on Scopus papers. After excluding non-relevant stud-ies, 24 papers were included in final step. The environmental factors were classified as:• Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs)• Air pollutants• Pesticides and Herbicides• Heavy metals• Some scattered studies (for example on Nanoparticles or Mel-amin)Although some reviews reported a strong contribution for some environmental factors (e.g. some air pollutants, heavy metals or EDCs), there were not any consistency between the results of different studies in the same category.Conclusion: More studies addressing both environmental and genetic factors and a personalized approach are needed to give a better answer to this question.