Assessment of fertility and infertility in boron-exposed Turkish subpopulations - 3. Evaluation of fertility among sibs and in "borate families"

As a part of a work to reveal the health effects of boron and its compounds , fertility and infertility states of sibs of probands, contacted and inter viewed in the field, and of their spouses were given. The purposes were to prevent duplications seemingly inevitable in a relatively small community w ith prevailing consanguinity while analyzing marriages over respective gene rations and to reveal if there occurred an aggregation of infertile couples . Any family without offspring after about the second year of marriage was considered primary infertile as adopted throughout the study and such famil ies were ascertained through the individual pedigree charts set up accordin g to the instructions of the proband, he (she) himself (herself) being excl uded. The rates of childless families of this type were 0.0-3.4% among male and 0.9-3.8% among female sibs of the participant, and 2.3-10.0% among mal e and 0.0-5.6% among female sibs of his (her) spouse with averages of 2.3% of 1589, 2.6% of 1589, 4.0% of 1314, and 3.3% of 1436 instances, respective ly. The differences were insignificant and the rates were not different fro m those concerning probands themselves and that of a comparable segment of the Turkish population. "Borate families/ kindreds" with two or more members engaged in the borate industry were also assessed in order to detect if there was a significant c lustering of infertiles within the kindred. Although it was difficult to co mpare with a matched group, few couples were examples of familial concentra tion of infertility. These results provided further support that boron expo sure does not affect human reproduction primarily and most probably seconda rily.