Paternal military service in Vietnam and risk of spontaneous abortion

To investigate the relationship between paternal military service in Vietnam and the risk of spontaneous abortion, we compared the military service history among husbands of 201 women having a spontaneous abortion through 27 weeks' gestation with that of women having full-term live-born infants at Boston Hospital for Women from July 1976 until February 1978. Paternal military veterans were identified by cross-matching identifying information from obstetric records with state and national military records. Compared with men with no known military service, the adjusted relative odds of spontaneous abortion through 27 weeks' gestation was 0.88 for the wives of Vietnam veterans (95% confidence interval, 0.42 to 1.86) and 0.74 (95% confidence interval, 0.46 to 1.17) for wives of non-Vietnam veterans. These data suggest that the risk of spontaneous abortion was not increased in this population of married US Vietnam veterans.