Month: October 2012

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Supermice Invade Europe with Extra Strength Sperm

brigitte

The male chromosome of an Eastern European house mouse has infiltrated Western Europe, creating a hybrid strain of “supermice” with extra-high sperm counts.

Normally, hybridization, when two subspecies mate to produce offspring, results in decreased  sperm strength in the offspring. But when the western mouse Mus musculus domesticus picks up a male, or Y, chromosome from the eastern mouse Mus musculus musculus, the result is a strain of mice with higher-than-normal sperm counts that now thrives in the Czech Republic and the Bavarian region of Germany. Read full article.

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Sperm Black Market in China

brigitte

Huang, a professional black-market sperm donor, vowed for a third time to Yu Hua and her husband, “I swear that I will never meet this child for my whole life under any circumstances!”

The couple from Shanxi Province nodded. They had been longing for a child, and Huang was tall and intelligent. Although not classically handsome, he bore a striking resemblance to Yu Hua’s husband, and shared his blood type, ensuring no one would ever have to know their secret.

They signed the agreement to let Huang donate his sperm to the wife, joining the ranks of a growing number of Chinese couples who resort to the Internet-based black market, despite the lack of safeguards to protect women from giving birth to an unhealthy baby. There are only 11 sperm banks in China, and they suffer from a shortage of sperm donors, explains Jiang Xiang-long, director of the Jiangxi Province Human Sperm Bank. Read full article.

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Misinformation, Stigma Plague Emergency Contraception in Hamilton

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Misinformation, lack of awareness about accessibility and stigma may be a barrier to the use of emergency contraception in Hamilton, which has a higher rate of teenage pregnancies than the provincial average.

“Even in this day and age obviously there are a large number of unplanned pregnancies,” said Dr. Nicholas Leyland, Chairman of the Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics at McMaster University.

“When a woman finds herself in a situation where it’s necessary—whether the condom or something else—there is a need for post-coital birth control,” he added.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) said that more than half of Canadian women are unfamiliar with emergency birth control. To encourage greater awareness about emergency contraception–sometimes known as the “morning after pill”– the SOGC made a public appeal on World Conception Day (Sept. 26) to dispel some of the myths and misinformation surrounding its use and accessibility. Read full article.

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Inheritance of Mitochondrial Disease Determined When Mother is an Embryo

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(Medical Xpress)—The risk of a child to inherit mitochondrial diseases – i. e. malfunction in what is usually referred to as the power plants of the cell – is largely decided when the future mother herself is still an embryo. This according to a novel study by scientists at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which is published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Mitochondria are small structures within almost every cell in the body, responsible mainly for energy production and fat metabolism. Their function is very important, and they contain their own genome, called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The mitochondrial genome is inherited via the mother, where hundreds of thousands of mtDNA copies are packed in the female germ cell. Read full article.

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US Scientists Aim to Make Sperm from Stem Cells

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US researchers say they will redouble their efforts to create human sperm from stem cells following the success of a Japanese study involving mice. A Kyoto University team used mice stem cells to create eggs, which were fertilised to produce baby mice.

Dr Renee Pera, of Stanford University in California, aims to create human sperm to use for reproduction within two years, and eggs within five years. Read full article.

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Healthy Diet Makes Better Sperm

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Tuesday Oct 9, 2012 (foodconsumer.org) — Eating a healthy diet improves the mobility of sperm in young men, according to a study recently released in Human Reproduction.

A.J. Gaskins at Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, MA and colleagues conducted the study and found men in the highest quartile of intake of a Prudent diet had 11.3 percent higher percentage of progressively motile sperm, compared with men in the lowest quartile. Read full article.
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Hormone Therapy Safe in Early Menopause

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Researchers in Denmark have become the first to offer statistical proof that hormone therapy is not only safe for menopausal women who begin it early — it actually reduces their risk of mortality, heart attack and heart failure.

The 16-year randomized study of about a thousand women offers new proof that the “timing hypothesis,” which suggests that hormone therapy protects women from heart disease if they start it soon after their last menstrual period, is correct. Researchers also saw no difference in breast cancer risk between those who were assigned the hormone therapy and those who were not. Read full article. 

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Researchers Re-Create Eggs to Treat Infertility

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Researchers working with laboratory rats have developed a technique that could someday help infertile women who lack usable eggs because of a hormone imbalance to conceive with new eggs created from their own ovaries.

Many women are unable to conceive because of a condition known as polycystic ovary syndrome, in which the ovaries fail to secrete enough hormones to stimulate egg production.  Injury to the ovaries caused by radiation or surgery also can interfere with a woman’s ability to produce enough viable eggs, or oocytes, to achieve pregnancy. Read full article.

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ASRM Statement on New Study on Hormone Therapy for Menopausal Women

ASRM News and Research

In the WHI study, women were in their 60´s when they began taking hormones, in this study, the average age of the women was only 50 when they first began using HT. This study much more closely resembles the use of HT in clinical practice. Data from WHI in women aged 50-59 also showed that women receiving estrogen alone had a significantly reduced rate of CVD and a reduced mortality in the 11 year follow-up.