Do women with endometriosis suffer more often from miscarriages?

Alexandra Kohl Schwartz, B Alvera, Monika Wölfler, Karolina Stojanow, Felix Häberlin, Kirsten Geraedts, Patrick Imesch, Brigitte Leeners
In: Geburtshilfe und Frauenheilkunde · 2015 · vol. 75(07) · doi:10.1055/s-0035-1558353 · W2620290677
article OA: closed CC0
Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by gemini-2.5-flash-lite, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

Severe endometriosis may be linked to a higher spontaneous abortion rate, potentially due to oxidative stress.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 · read from full text ⓘ

This retrospective study analyzed obstetric histories from 421 women with surgically and histologically confirmed endometriosis and 421 age-matched controls recruited from Swiss and German hospitals, using a self-administered questionnaire. The study found no significant difference in the number of reported miscarriages between women with endometriosis and controls, and endometriosis severity (ASRM stage) was not associated with miscarriage risk. Women with endometriosis had a stronger difference in childlessness (defined as having at least one miscarriage and no term pregnancy), and childless women with endometriosis reported significantly more emotional distress related to undesired childlessness. A major caveat noted by the authors is that some data were missing for miscarriage history and that subgroup analyses (e.g., highest ASRM stage) involved very low numbers. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it tests whether women with endometriosis have higher miscarriage rates and reports similar miscarriage counts but higher childlessness and related emotional distress.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Endometriosis is a chronic disease occurring in up to 10% of women during reproductive age. Compared to women without endometriosis the number of childbirths is reduced, but can be augmented by artificial reproductive therapy (ART). Current research supports the hypothesis that most probably due to oxidative stress severe endometriosis might be associated with a higher rate of spontaneous abortion.
Full text 2,449 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 4 sections · click to expand

Introduction

Endometriosis is a chronic disease occurring in up to 10% of women during reproductive age. Compared to women without endometriosis the number of childbirths is reduced, but can be augmented by artificial reproductive therapy (ART). Current research supports the hypothesis that most probably due to oxidative stress severe endometriosis might be associated with a higher rate of spontaneous abortion.

Methods

Retrospective data from 421 women with surgically/histologically confirmed endometriosis and 421 controls matched for age were analyzed. Women were recruited in different Swiss and German hospitals. Obstetric history was collected using a self-administered questionnaire designed for the present study. Socio-demographic data, medical and parts of the gynaeco-obstetrical history were evaluated for the present study.

Results

In our population a total of 127 women (16%) had a history of miscarriages. There was no significant difference for the number of miscarriages between women with endometriosis (WwE) (N = 59/of 388) and control women (CW) without endometriosis (N = 68/of 405). 49 women (5.8%) did not answer this specific question. In WwE there were 41 with one, 12 with two and six with three and more miscarriages, compared to 48 CW with one, 12 with two and eight with three and more miscarriages. In both groups a history of miscarriage was associated with increased age (p = 0.047). The severity of endometriosis showed no association with the risk for a miscarriage (ASRM I/14 women, II/16, III/21, IV/11). The difference for childlessness (having at least one miscarriage and no term pregnancy) was strong (32 WwE and 14 CW). Independent of prior term pregnancies or miscarriages WwE reported significantly higher emotional distress associated with undesired childlessness than those without (p = 0.001).

Conclusion

WwE had the same amount of miscarriages as CW, but childlessness was significantly more frequent. The stage of endometriosis was not associated with the miscarriage rate. WwE ASRM III had the highest number of spontaneous abortions, maybe due to a reduced ovarian function because of endometriomas. However, the number of analyzed cases was very low. Childless WwE and miscarriages experience more emotional distress associated with childlessness than women without endometriosis.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Condition tags

endometriosis

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. The paper's references may be in our DB but unresolved to ``paper_id`` (resolution happens at ingest when the cited DOI matches a row we already have). Run the cross-source citation reconcile pass to retry.

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-08-27T06:26:25.619941+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK