The psychosocial impact of premature ovarian insufficiency on male partners and their perceptions of the disease

ABSTRACT

Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is affecting about 1% women of reproductive age. However, current studies have primarily focused on women with the views of male partners greatly absent from the literature. We conduct this research to investigate the psychosocial effect of POI on male partners and their perceptions of the disease.52 male partners of POI patient (experiment group) and 52 controls (control group) were available for analysis. Anxiety, depression, and marital relationship were assessed for male partners in both groups. A questionnaire about perceptions of POI was completed by the experiment group. Male partners of POI patient experienced greater levels of anxiety (10.96 versus 4.88; P < 0.01) and depression (12.23 versus 5.19; P < 0.01) compared with controls. In addition, they experienced worse marital relationship in several aspects than their counterparts. The findings also demonstrate that most POI patient male partners had inadequate and inaccurate knowledge about their partners’ disease, which may be the results of insufficient professional counseling from health-care practitioners. Moreover, their understanding level of the disease was correlated to anxiety (r = −0.64; P < 0.01), depression (r = −0.38; P < 0.01), and communication (r = 0.28; P < 0.05).

The study highlights the need for health-care services, as well as support and professional information resources aimed at POI patients’ male partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Premature ovarian insufficiency
• male partner
• anxiety
• depression
• marital relationship

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all the patients for their participation in this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

The Ethics Committee of Changzheng Hospital gave a positive approval for this study. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Date availability statement

Original data in this study are with the corresponding author and may be provided once requested.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [81873821]; National Key Research and Development Program of China [2017YFC1001404,2018YFC1002802]; Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality [16411963500].