Page 21 - Fertility in Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis Vruchtbaarheid van vrouwen met reumatoïde artritis

Objectives and outline of this thesis 1 This thesis aims to give an overview of fertility in women with RA, and to look further
into the association of fertility with RA disease characteristics and the use of anti-
rheumatic drugs. Therefore, this thesis has the following objectives:
(I) to study the time to pregnancy and the occurrence of subfertility in women with RA, and their associations with clinical aspects of RA,
(II) to look into the occurrence of miscarriages and its association with
RA disease characteristics,
(III) to study the ovarian function in women with RA, and its role in the
TTP in female RA patients trying to conceive, and
(IV) to investigate the long-term decrease of ovarian function over time
in women with RA.
The rst part of this thesis, chapters 2, 3 and 4, will focus on fertility and reproductive outcome in women with RA. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 will assess ovarian function in RA patients. Next, chapter 8 will reflect on the results, discussing how these impact our current understanding of fertility in RA, what their implications for clinical practice are, and giving suggestions for future research. Finally, chapters 9 and 10 will summarize the main ndings of the different studies in this thesis.
General introduction
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