Unlocking the Path to Healthier Families: The Untapped Potential of Men’s Preconception Health

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Abstract

This debate paper explores the necessity of introducing a comprehensive primary care model for men’s preconception health. It highlights the importance of a holistic approach that includes risk assessment, health promotion, and clinical and psychological interventions. Despite the current limited focus on male preconception health in primary care, there is evidence suggesting a growing awareness among men about the importance of optimizing their health before conception. The paper stresses the importance of such a model in addressing various aspects of men’s well-being, family dynamics, and overall reproductive health outcomes. It also acknowledges potential limitations and considerations related to implementing this crucial healthcare approach.

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The clinical content of preconception care: preconception care for men.

Keith Frey, Shannon Navarro, Milton Kotelchuck … (2008)

Little attention has been given to men's preconception health and health care. This paper reviews the key elements of an approach to optimizing the preconception health status of men. Preconception care for men is important for improving family planning and pregnancy outcomes, enhancing the reproductive health and health behaviors of their female partners, and preparing men for fatherhood. Most importantly, preconception care offers an opportunity, similar to the opportunity it presents for women, for disease prevention and health promotion in men. Currently, no consensus exists on service delivery of preconception care for men--who should provide preconception care to whom, where, when, and how, and there are significant barriers to this care including the organization, financing, training, and demand. Finally, much more research on the content and how to effectively market and implement preconception care for men is needed.

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Offspring birth weight and parental mortality: prospective observational study and meta-analysis.

Christopher Davey, Elina Hypponen, D Lawlor … (2007)

The authors have investigated associations between offspring size at birth and parental cardiovascular disease mortality among 12,086 mothers and 6,936 fathers of participants in the British 1958 birth cohort. Birth weight was inversely associated with all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality in both mothers and fathers. The adjusted hazard ratio of cardiovascular disease mortality for a 1-standard deviation increase in offspring birth weight in mothers was 0.87 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.82, 0.93) and in fathers was 0.94 (95% CI: 0.89, 0.99). The association was not specific for cardiovascular disease. In fathers, similar weak associations with violent and accidental deaths, stomach cancer, and alcohol- and smoking-related outcomes were found. Weak associations for these outcomes were also found for mothers, but the magnitude of the association with cardiovascular disease was greater than with any other outcomes. In a meta-analysis pooling results from this study with six others, the adjusted hazard ratio of cardiovascular disease mortality among mothers was 0.75 (95% CI: 0.67, 0.84) and that among fathers was 0.93 (95% CI: 0.91, 0.95), with evidence that the difference in effect between mothers and fathers was not due to chance (p < 0.001). The weak association of offspring birth weight with cardiovascular disease in fathers may be due to residual confounding by factors such as socioeconomic position and smoking that they share with the offspring's mother and that would therefore be associated with low offspring birth weight as well as adverse outcomes in the father. The stronger association in mothers is consistent with intergenerational effects on intrauterine growth and with the fetal origins hypothesis.

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Father's Role in Preconception Health.

Milton Kotelchuck, Michael Lu (2017)

As part of the federal multi-agency conference on Paternal Involvement in Pregnancy Outcomes, the existing Fatherhood paradigm was expanded to include a new focus on Men's Preconception Health. This concept grew out of the women's preconception health movement and the maternal and child health (MCH) life course perspective, as well as pioneering research from the child development, public health data and family planning fields. It encourages a new examination of how men's preconception health impacts both reproductive outcomes and men's own subsequent health and development. This essay introduces the concept of men's preconception health and health care; examines its historical development; notes the challenges of its inclusion into fatherhood and reproductive health programs; and situates it within a longer men's reproductive health life course. We then briefly explore six ways men's preconception health and health care can have positive direct and indirect impacts-planned and wanted pregnancies (family planning); enhanced paternal biologic and genetic contributions; improved reproductive health biology for women; improved reproductive health practices and outcomes for women; improved capacity for parenthood and fatherhood (psychological development); and enhanced male health through access to primary health care. Research on men's preconception health and health care is very limited and siloed. We propose a research agenda to advance this topic in three broad domains: increasing the basic epidemiology and risk factor knowledge base; implementing and evaluating men's preconception health/fatherhood interventions (addressing clinical health care, psychological resiliency/maturation, and social determinants of health); and fostering more fatherhood health policy and advocacy research.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Muna Abed Alah:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3091-9483

MAbedAlah@hamad.qa

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Prev (2022)

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Prev (2022)

Title: Journal of Prevention (2022)

Publisher: Springer US (New York )

ISSN (Print): 2731-5533

ISSN (Electronic): 2731-5541

Publication date (Electronic): 28 November 2023

Publication date PMC-release: 28 November 2023

Publication date (Print): 2024

Volume: 45

Issue: 1

Pages: 1-8

Affiliations

Community Medicine Department, Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), ( https://ror.org/02zwb6n98) P.O. Box 3050, Doha, Qatar

Author information

Muna Abed Alah http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3091-9483

Article

Publisher ID: 762

DOI: 10.1007/s10935-023-00762-y

PMC ID: 10844380

PubMed ID: 38017293

SO-VID: 17a34f14-4f27-4841-aa19-5d06b95f30a2

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date accepted : 18 November 2023

Funding

Funded by: Hamad Medical Corporation

Open Access :

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

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Keywords: preconception,men,primary healthcare,health promotion

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Keywords: preconception, men, primary healthcare, health promotion

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Unlocking the Path to Healthier Families: The Untapped Potential of Men’s Preconception Health

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Sushruta Journal of Health Policy & Opinion

Most cited references 25

The clinical content of preconception care: preconception care for men.

Offspring birth weight and parental mortality: prospective observational study and meta-analysis.

Father's Role in Preconception Health.

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