Abstract
BackgroundFew studies have examined health literacy and fertility knowledge among women from low income, socio-culturally diverse communities presenting for fertility care in the United States. Our study sought to examine demographic predictors of fertility-related knowledge among infertile women from low and high-resource communities in two major metropolitan centers in the United States.MethodsFertility Knowledge Assessments were administered to women presenting for fertility care at county medical centers serving low-resource, largely immigrant patients and to women from largely affluent populations presenting to comprehensive fertility centers in two cities. The influence of demographic predictors on fertility knowledge was examined through regression analysis.ResultsA total of 143 women were included in our analysis. In the county hospital/low resource clinic (LR, n = 70), the mean age was 32.8 ± 6.1 years vs 35.0 ± 5.0 years in the fee-for-service/high resource clinic (HR, n = 73). Among the LR patients, 74% were immigrants, 71% had an annual income <$25,000 and 52% had completed high school. Among HR patients, 36% were immigrants, 60% had an annual income >$100,000, and 95% had some college or above. On average, women from HR settings scored 3.0 points higher on the Fertility Knowledge Assessment than their LR counterparts (p < 0.001). Upon multivariate analysis, education level remained the sole independent factor associated with fertility knowledge assessment score (p < 0.001). Stratifying by resource level revealed that income was highly associated with fertility knowledge (p < 0.01) among high resource individuals even when adjusting for education level.ConclusionsWomen from low resource, largely immigrant communities, seeking fertility care have greater disparities in fertility knowledge and lower health literacy compared to women from high resource clinical settings. Further studies are needed to understand these barriers and to develop targeted inventions to lower disparities and improve care for these vulnerable populations.
Highlights
Few studies have examined health literacy and fertility knowledge among women from low income, socio-culturally diverse communities presenting for fertility care in the United States
As an example, reduced health literacy is associated with lower cervical cancer screening rates and a higher incidence of cervical cancer, in lowresource communities in the United States that carry the highest burden for risk [2]
Medical students and OB/GYN residents are supervised by a board-certified Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility (REI) specialist or a senior REI fellow
Summary
Few studies have examined health literacy and fertility knowledge among women from low income, socio-culturally diverse communities presenting for fertility care in the United States. Our study sought to examine demographic predictors of fertility-related knowledge among infertile women from low and high-resource communities in two major metropolitan centers in the United States. As an example, reduced health literacy is associated with lower cervical cancer screening rates and a higher incidence of cervical cancer, in lowresource communities in the United States that carry the highest burden for risk [2]. Low health literacy has been associated with poor contraceptive knowledge within resource-limited, minority populations [3,4,5]. The World Health Organization ranks infertility as the 5th highest generator of disability among the global population of all people under 60 years of age [6]. An increasing number of studies have examined health literacy in the domain of fertility knowledge [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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