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Month: February 2013
Seminal Research: New Study Says TV Watching Lowers Sperm Count
For the past 20 years scientists have been fretting over the decline of sperm counts in the West. The most recent alarm came late last year, when a study found that sperm counts had fallen in French men from an average in 1989 of 73.6 million sperm per milliliter of semen in a 35-year-old man to 49.9 million per milliliter in 2005.
While nowhere close to threatening our fertility as a species—that number would need to drop below 15 million per milliliter—it is not a comforting trend given that lower sperm counts make it harder to father children. But the cause has been unknown. Did the lower sperm counts stem from high-fat diets, being overweight, or trace amounts of chemicals in the environment and their effect on the body’s hormones? The search for a smoking gun produced a lot of intense speculation but little firm evidence.
Now, a deceptively simple study published in theBritish Journal of Sports Medicine has found a new and surprising culprit: television.
“Men who watched more than 20 hours of TV every week had 44 percent lower sperm counts compared to those who watched almost no TV,” says lead author Audrey Gaskins, a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s School of Public Health. “And then men who exercised for 15 hours or more per week at moderate to vigorous levels had 73 percent higher sperm counts than those who exercised less than five hours per week.” Read full article.
Changes in health-care laws and a new device may increase the appeal of the IUD
Even though they’re more effective at preventing pregnancy than most other forms of contraception, long-acting birth-control methods such as intrauterine devices and hormonal implants have been a tough sell for women, especially younger ones. But changes in health-care laws and the introduction of the first new IUD in 12 years may make these methods more attractive. Increased interest in the devices could benefit younger women because of their high rates of unintended pregnancy, according to experts in women’s reproductive health.
Even though they’re more effective at preventing pregnancy than most other forms of contraception, long-acting birth-control methods such as intrauterine devices and hormonal implants have been a tough sell for women, especially younger ones. But changes in health-care laws and the introduction of the first new IUD in 12 years may make these methods more attractive. Increased interest in the devices could benefit younger women because of their high rates of unintended pregnancy, according to experts in women’s reproductive health. Read full article.
Super-ovulation fertility drugs need better monitoring, doctors warn
Canadian fertility doctors are calling for tighter controls on the use of super-ovulation fertility drugs that in some cases are being used merely to make women pregnant faster.
The drugs, a class known as gonadotropins, stimulate a woman’s ovaries to produce multiple eggs for fertilization. But they also carry a high risk of multiple births, as well as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, where the ovaries keep expanding, growing so fat and swollen they can twist from the sheer weight and leak fluid into the pelvis and abdomen. In rare cases, the syndrome can lead to blood clots, kidney failure, heart failure and death.
Gonadotropins are often used in combination with artificial insemination, or IUI, where sperm is inserted directly into the womb. The appeal for couples is that it costs thousands of dollars less per cycle than in vitro fertilization, which involves retrieving eggs from the woman, mixing them with sperm and transferring the resulting embryos back into the uterus. Read full article.
DNA Test for Rare Disorders Becomes More Routine
Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advanced prenatal testing.
The test found no sign of Angelman syndrome, the rare genetic disorder that had struck Jacob. But as months passed, Eli was not crawling or walking or babbling at ages when other babies were.
“Whatever the milestones were, my son was not meeting them,” Ms. Sukin said.
Desperate to find out what is wrong with Eli, now 8, the Sukins, of The Woodlands, Tex., have become pioneers in a new kind of testing that is proving particularly helpful in diagnosing mysterious neurological illnesses in children. Scientists sequence all of a patient’s genes, systematically searching for disease-causing mutations.
A few years ago, this sort of test was so difficult and expensive that it was generally only available to participants in research projects like those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But the price has plunged in just a few years from tens of thousands of dollars to around $7,000 to $9,000 for a family. Baylor College of Medicine and a handful of companies are now offering it. Insurers usually pay. Read full article.
IVF does not boost cancer risk, study finds
Women getting fertility treatments can be reassured that in vitro fertilization (IVF) does not increase their risk of breast and gynecological cancers, according to a U.S. study of Israeli women.
“The findings were fairly reassuring. Nothing was significantly elevated,” said lead author Louise Brinton, chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
Ovulation-stimulating drugs or puncturing of the ovaries to retrieve eggs can be part of IVF treatments, procedures that researchers have suspected may increase women’s risk of cancer. Indeed, previous studies did link IVF early in life to heightened risks of breast cancer and borderline ovarian tumors.
But other studies have found little connection between fertility treatments and cancer.
The association has been difficult to untangle, experts say, in part because it’s hard to know whether unmeasured factors not realized to IVF may affect the risk of cancer in women who have trouble conceiving. In addition, so far there haven’t been a lot of women who developed cancer after fertility treatment included in studies. Read full article.
Illegal purchase of sperm, eggs and surrogacy services leads to 27 charges against Canadian fertility company and CEO
For nine years, the criminal law in Canada has prohibited anyone from buying human eggs or sperm or the services of a surrogate mother.
For just as long, it has been common knowledge in the fertility-treatment field — and easily confirmed by anyone with Internet access — that such commercial transactions routinely take place, conveniently free of enforcement action.
That all changed Friday, with news that an Ontario surrogacy consultant and her company had been charged with 27 offences under both assisted-reproduction legislation and the Criminal Code, capping a groundbreaking, year-long investigation.
The charges laid by RCMP investigators against Leia Picard and her Canadian Fertility Consultants (CFC) in Brighton, Ont. — the firm also has a branch in Comox, B.C. — stunned the thriving assisted-reproduction industry, while also raising questions about whether the neglected legislation itself is even needed. Critics applauded what they considered long-overdue action. Read full article.
Courts split on contraception, cases plow forward
The cases brought against the Obama administration’s employer contraception coverage rule are largely marching forward, despite the White House’s recent attempt at compromise, the American Civil Liberties Union noted in an update Thursday.
Brigitte Amiri, an attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told reporters more than 40 cases have been filed against the rule from for-profit and nonprofit groups that oppose having to pay for contraception on moral grounds. Some cases are traveling up to the appellate courts, where, she said, five decisions regarding temporary relief from the rule have been made so far. Three circuit courts have denied temporary relief to plaintiffs, and two have granted it.
When the administration rolls out its final rule regarding nonprofit organizations, more cases brought by the groups could be dismissed as they would be exempt from the coverage requirement.
The ACLU has filed amicus briefs in many cases in support of the contraception rule and the government. Read full article.
Today, Few Public Family Planning Centers Accept Insurance
Most women can expect to get contraceptives without paying out of pocket for them thanks to the federal Affordable Care Act. Women who are young or those who are poor and rely on publicly funded family planning centers for reproductive health services are covered, too.But there’s a catch.
IVF Clinic Deploys Ion Torrent Sequencing in Embryo Screening
A reproductive clinic in New Jersey has successfully used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to screen embryos conceived in otherwise routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) cases prior to implantation.