Abstract

A postal questionnaire was used in a nationwide case control study of women with scleroderma to investigate whether there was an increased rate of spontaneous abortion before the onset of the disease. The results from 155 case control pairs studied showed that the women with scleroderma had twice the rate of spontaneous abortion and three times the rate of fertility problems (no successful pregnancy by the age of 35) of the control women. Previous uncontrolled studies have suggested that established scleroderma is associated with an adverse reproductive history. The results from this investigation suggest that the adverse reproductive history may antedate the clinical diagnosis of scleroderma by many years and may possibly have an aetiological role. Such a hypothesis is consistent with the, as yet unexplained, marked female excess in incidence of the disease, with the peak age of onset occurring shortly after the reproductive period.