Infertility and prevalence of Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Systematic Review

Introduction: According to the WHO evaluation (2004), it is estimated that more than 186 million ever-married women of reproductive age in developing countries were maintaining child wish translating infertility into one in every four couples. For treatment, various types of medical, surgical and fertility assistance methods have been proposed. However, the use of complementary and alternative medicine with classical medicine has significantly increased over the last three decades by infertile patients and physicians. The purpose of this study is to review the prevalence of the use of complementary and alternative therapies in infertility. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted based on the PRISMA systematic review protocol. The study data were obtained from search of international electronic resources including: Pub med, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Persian databases: including SID, Iran Medex, Magiran, and manual searchs. The used keywords consisted of Complementary and alternative medicine/therapy, herbal medicine, acupuncture, traditional medicine ‘infertility, sterility, fertility, pregnancy The inclusion criteria were articles published in English and Persian up June 2018, which were cross-sectional types and examined the prevalence of the use of complementary therapies in women or infertilecouples. All articles reviewed by two evaluators independently. Results: From total of 4560 obtained articles, 17 papers were selected in the study. Studies have been carried out in various countries, including developed countries such as United States, England, Australia, Denmark and in developing countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Taiwan, Uganda and Iran. large number of infertile women used alternative therapies such as acupuncture, multivitamins, herbs, and mineral supplements for traditional drugs and spiritual healing. The use of herbal and food supplements were the most common methods. In developed countries, the highest rates of use of complementary and alternative therapies in infertility was in Australia (over 70%) and at least in the United Kingdom (23%) and the United States (29%). In Taiwan, women with primary infertility, have high rate of use of traditional medicine (96.17%) between developing countries and the lowest related to Lebanon (41%). Complementary use in women was more than men in the most of studies. Conclusion: The vast majority of infertile women had used complementary and alternativemedicine for infertility. Health-care practitioners and fertility specialists need to be proactive and knowledgeable in acquiring and documenting the use of these practices, potential risks and benefits associated with their use. Further research is needed to examine the reasons for use of complementary and alternative medicine.