Author: brigitte

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Stress and anxiety linked to sperm quality

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Doctor Katarzyna Koziol injects sperm directly into an egg during IVF procedure called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection at Novum clinic in Warsaw(Reuters Health) – A man’s ability to produce sperm may depend on his ability to handle stress, according to a new study from Italy.

Researchers found that men with higher levels of both short- and long-term stress and anxiety ejaculated less semen and had lower sperm concentration and counts. Men with the highest anxiety levels were also more likely to have sperm that were deformed or less mobile.

But one fertility researcher not involved in the new work said it’s hard to know how the results apply to the general population because the research included men who were already seeking treatment at a fertility clinic.

“Do you become stressed from becoming infertile or is stress causing infertility?” asked Tina Jensen from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, who has studied the effects of environmental factors on sperm quality.

Previous research has found that men going through fertility treatment or evaluation have higher stress levels than the average person, and some studies have also shown links between stress and sperm quality, according to the Italian researchers, led by Elisa Vellani of the European Hospital in Rome. Read full article.

 

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Infertile couples turn to disputed therapy

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infertile couplesAs their van rumbled away from the McDonald’s, onto the Arizona road and toward Mexico a mile away, the Kowalskis wondered if the family they’d long envisioned having would finally become real.

Jennifer Benito-Kowalski and Steve Kowalski had traveled 950 miles from their San Carlos home. A clinic just over the border would be the latest stop in a journey three years in the making: the quest to get pregnant.

Natural conception hadn’t happened, fertility treatments had failed and the doctors were out of ideas. At 38, Benito-Kowalski worried she’d never be a mother.

Ultimately, the Kowalskis would pay a surrogate in India to carry their child, who is due in May. But that decision was months away.

In 2011, the couple turned to the Alan E. Beer Center for Reproductive Immunology and Genetics, a Los Gatos clinic with an international reputation for curing frustrated, vulnerable women of infertility.

But the clinic’s methods involve experimental therapies that outside studies have concluded do not work and that insurers often do not cover. One therapy, in which a woman is repeatedly injected with her partner’s blood cells, has been prohibited in the United States for more than a decade. That hasn’t stopped Beer’s doctors from directing hundreds of patients to clinics outside the country to have it done – and pay thousands of out-of-pocket dollars. Read full article.

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New biopsy procedure helping women avoid repeat miscarriages

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HOUSTON (KTRK) — Miscarriages can be devastating for couples who are hoping for children, and it’s especially hard when a woman has repeated miscarriages. But now there’s a high-tech procedure to help avoid repeat miscarriages and save parents-to-be from heartbreak.

Victoria is five months old. But at one point, her mother wasn’t sure she would ever be able to have a baby. Charlotte had six miscarriages before she deliver Victoria.

“It was frustrating because you’re pregnant the you’re not, you’re pregnant you’re not,” Charlotte said.

Chromosome abnormalities are one of the top reasons for miscarriages. But at Houston IVF at Memorial Hermann Memorial City, women who have had multiple miscarriages are being offered a new technology that allows infertility specialists to find the embryo most likely to survive.

“We can actually find the embryos that are chromosomally normal and only transfer the normal ones back,” Houston IVF Dr. Timothy Hickman said.

They biopsy the outer cells, not the embryo itself. That makes the test less invasive and more accurate. Read full article.

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Estrogen therapy may fight early Alzheimer’s

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brandWomen who carry a gene that puts them at increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease show signs of early aging at the cellular level long before the first hints of dementia might set in, when they appear otherwise healthy and active, a team of UCSF and Stanford scientists found.

But there’s good news, too. When those women used hormone replacement therapy to treat symptoms of menopause, evidence of advanced aging disappeared. After just two years on hormones, women with the gene looked, under a microscope, the same age as their peers without the gene.

The research, which was published last week, is still preliminary and only involved a small sample of women with and without the Alzheimer’s risk gene. It raises a host of fascinating questions: What effect does the Alzheimer’s gene have on aging overall? What role do hormones play in aging? Can replacing the hormones women lose as they age prevent diseases like dementia?

There are not many answers, but the research findings add to the already complex and controversial discussion about hormone replacement therapy and who will benefit from it.  Read full article.

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Seminal Research: New Study Says TV Watching Lowers Sperm Count

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sperm count and TVFor 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.

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Changes in health-care laws and a new device may increase the appeal of the IUD

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contraception IUDEven 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.

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Super-ovulation fertility drugs need better monitoring, doctors warn

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close up of woman inject drugs to prepare for treatmentCanadian 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.

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DNA Test for Rare Disorders Becomes More Routine

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Genetic ScreeningDebra 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.

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IVF does not boost cancer risk, study finds

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IVF Cancer RiskWomen 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.

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Illegal purchase of sperm, eggs and surrogacy services leads to 27 charges against Canadian fertility company and CEO

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reproductive laws CFCFor 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.