The relationship between infection in mothers and neonate's gender.

BACKGROUND

The secondary sex ratio can be affected by various factors such as stress, immunosuppression, and age of parents in addition to mother infectious disease (Maternal infections). Toxoplasmosis is one of the critical maternal parasitic infections during pregnancy. Besides the complications of the acute form of the disease, hormonal shifts, and even alterations in the secondary sex ratio can be induced by the manipulative activity of the chronic form of the disease. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the correlation between infection in mothers and neonate's gender.

METHODS

In this case-control study, 137 seropositive mothers to Anti- IgG(case) was compared to 137 age-matched subject -seronegative mothers(control) in terms of their neonate's gender. These individuals were randomly selected based on exclusions and inclusions criteria of the study from among 2014 mothers who had been tested for infection during pregnancy from 2015 to 2018 in Shiraz, Iran.

RESULTS

From a total of 2014 studied pregnant mothers, 326 (16.2%) mothers were seropositive to anti- IgG, and 1688 (83.8%) were negative for IgG. It was found that the numbers of female and male neonates were 136 (45.48%) and 163 (54.51%) in the control group whereas, they were 165 (49.84%) and 166 (50.15%) in the case group, respectively. The sex ratio was 1.006:1 in -seropositive and 1.2:1 in -seronegative mothers. The number of male and females offsprings indicated a significant difference in -seronegative mothers (54.5%,  = .015). Moreover, comparing the number of males and females between the two randomly selected groups showed that female gender is significantly more than male gender in seropositive mothers to (54.8%,  = .014), which means that of 301 females, 165 offspring were born to seropositive mothers. No significant difference was observed for the sex ratio of aborted fetuses between groups. However, in the -seropositive group, the sex ratio of aborted fetuses showed that the aborted male fetuses were significantly higher in number. (31 male vs 13 female,  < .001).

CONCLUSION

Comprehensively, a significant relationship was found between chronic infection and secondary sex ratio. However, it is suggested that this relationship be investigated in further studies as well as an animal study.