The Centre for Fertility and Health is a Norwegian Centre of Excellence at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Our overarching goal is to advance the understanding of the factors that influence fertility and elucidate the social and biological pathways through which fertility affects health across the lifespan.
In the last few decades we have witnessed marked changes in patterns of fertility and family structure in rich countries. These include increasing age at childbirth, a lower number of children born to each woman or man, more use of assisted reproductive technology (ART), higher frequency of family disruptions and increasingly complex family structures.
Elucidation of the complex biological and social causal mechanisms requires broad expertise. The multidisciplinary research team at Centre for Fertility and Health consists of epidemiologists, geneticists, physicians, psychologists, demographers, statisticians, sociologists and economists from Norway and abroad. Our research can be described in six integrated themes of research. Most of our research projects and activities are intertwined and integrated parts in several of these main themes.
Our main research themes are:
- Maternal and paternal age: We investigate the impact of maternal and paternal age at childbirth on subfertility, pregnancy outcomes, and consequences for parental and child health. We also analyse the factors behind the increasing age at childbearing.
- Infertility, subfertility and assisted reproductive technologies: We use genetic, epigenetic and registry data to investigate causes and consequences of infertility and health consequences of subfertility and assisted reproductive technologies in parents and children.
- Fetal life, adolescence and fertility outcomes: Starting with conception and fetal life, we investigate how factors in early life affect maturation, puberty, later fertility and health. Central topics include educational pathways, mental health in social interactions and partner formation.
- Fertility, family structure and transmission of health across generations: We investigate the causes and health consequences of various aspects of fertility such as number of children, number of siblings, childlessness, age at first birth, birth intervals, union formation and dissolution. We analyse determinants and health effects of union formation and dissolution, which are closely linked with fertility. We explore how health and disease are transmitted across generations.
- New statistical methods for analysing family and transgenerational data: We develop novel advanced statistical models to analyse genetic data from large-scale genome-wide association studies, integrating SNP and methylation data, and focusing on nuclear families and transgenerational data.
- Covid and its implication on young adults, education, partner formations and fertility: We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, living conditions, education and fertility.
