Tag: male infertility

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BPA (and More) Lowering Sperm Counts Across the Board

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If there was a problem with fertility, most men wouldn’t know it until they tried to conceive a child. Everything can seem to be in great working condition, but low sperm counts leading to infertility are more common than we might think. As a matter of fact, contrary to popular belief, about half of all infertility cases involve some problem on the man’s side of the two-person equation.

Sperm Counts Plummeting from Chemicals

According to experts, this usually comes as a surprise to men, who assume everything is working well until their wife doesn’t conceive after a few months of trying. Unlike in women, where symptoms like missed periods of erratic bleeding can signal fertility issues ahead of time, for men the problem is undetectable until the sperm is expected to perform.

 Numerous factors can contribute to male infertility, but one—low sperm count—has progressively been getting worse over the past 50 years.

What’s causing the lowered sperm counts in men? Several things can be blamed, says Dr. Paul Turek, a male fertility specialist.

Contributing factors to a low sperm count include:

  • Keeping your cell phone in your pocket
  • Consistently using a laptop in your lap
  • Smoking
  • Drinking
  • Recreational drugs
  • Some hair loss medications
  • Illness
  • Stress
  • BPA
 

Yes, BPA (Bispehnol-A), still found in plastic food containers, can seriously affect both male and female fertility. Though the FDA recently moved to ban the use of BPA in baby bottles, it is still found in numerous everyday products. And even those labeled “BPA-free” now contain a distant relative to BPA, known as BPS chemical, whose affects may be just as detrimental. Read full article.

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For Soldiers, Sperm Banking Could be the New Flack Jacket

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An upsurge of genital injuries amongst Afghanistan vets is becoming the new “signature wound” of the war. But soldiers arriving home with these injuries have drawn attention to the lack of government support for in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination using donated sperm, which costs up to $7,000 per procedure.

A new policy highlights these grievances, as reported by the Huffington Post:

The policy authorizes payment for some reproductive procedures for the first time, including limited in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. But it also specifically excludes covering males who cannot produce sperm. “Third-party donations and surrogacy are not covered benefits,” the policy states firmly.

The average age of soldiers with genital wounds is 24, and the majority of them are married.
Since 2005, at least 1,875 American troops have suffered genital wounds, including 51 so far this year. They are among the 34,440 American battle casualties caused by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, a grim toll that includes over 3,000 dead and 31,394 wounded through May, according to the most recent Defense Department data.

Read full article.

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Afghanistan Veterans With Genital Wounds Receive Little Help From Pentagon

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WASHINGTON — For the growing number of soldiers and Marines whose genitals are damaged or destroyed by blasts from improvised explosive devices while in combat, the Pentagon has decided it will not provide some critical reproductive health benefits.

To put it bluntly, if you are sent to war and an IED blast blows off your testicles, the U.S. government will not pay for your wife to have in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination using donated sperm.

The new policy, quietly adopted without announcement by the Defense Department, responds to the growing demands of the more than 1,800 veterans with genital wounds that the government that sent them to war now help them return to normal life, including raising a family.

The policy authorizes payment for some reproductive procedures for the first time, including limited in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. But it also specifically excludes covering males who cannot produce sperm. “Third-party donations and surrogacy are not covered benefits,” the policy states firmly.

The Pentagon decision dashes the hopes of a growing number of young Americans wounded in combat and unable to produce sperm who had wanted to start a family. In one recent U.S. military study, the average age of those with genital wounds was 24 years. The majority of those in military service — 56 percent — are married.

Read full article.

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NICHD Issues Funding Opportunity Announcement for the Reproductive Medicine Network

ASRM News and Research

The NICHD invites applications from investigators willing to participate, with the assistance of the NICHD under cooperative agreements, in an ongoing multicenter cooperative program designed to conduct clinical studies to investigate problems in reproductive medicine including female and male infertility, gynecologic and male reproductive system diseases and disorders that impact fertility, problems in andrology and endocrinology affecting reproduction.

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Sperm Sequencing Could Help Fight Infertility

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Not all sperm are created equal. The first genetic comparison of individual sperm cells has revealed just how diverse they can be. The technology used to study these tiny cells might also be used to study cancer and allow doctors to screen eggs for in vitro fertilisation.

To investigate how much variety there is in one man’s sperm, Stephen Quake, Jianbin Wang and their colleagues at Stanford University in California compared sperm cells from a single semen sample.

Analysing the genes of individual cells is notoriously tricky, though. “It’s hard to express how difficult single cell experiments are,” says Adam Auton at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. To perform genetic sequencing, you need to amplify, or make lots of copies of the genes within a cell to have enough to analyse. The compounds needed for amplification produce chemical by-products that can make the analysis more difficult.

Read full article.

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Cell phones may damage sperm, health advocacy group says

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Men who carry their cell phone or Blackberry on their belt loop or in their pocket may be posing a risk to the health of their sperm and their fertility.

A major health advocacy group released a new report on the potentially harmful effects of cell phones on sperm. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reviewed the scientific literature and reported that 10 studies have found significant changes in sperm exposed to cell phone radiation.

The study reported: “In the most striking findings, men who carried their phones in a pocket or on the belt were more likely to have lower sperm counts and/or more inactive or less mobile sperm.”

“People are so preoccupied with brain tumors that the fertility issue gets very little play,” said Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a newsletter on electromagnetic radiation.

Exposure to cell phone radiation has also been associated with markers for sperm damage, such as higher levels of reactive oxygen species (chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen), oxidative stress, DNA damage and changes in sperm morphology.

“We have enough evidence to issue precautionary health warnings,” said Dr. Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. “The evidence for sperm damage is quite consistent across many studies,” he added.
“The issue is far from settled, yet the proposals put forward by EWG are low-cost precautionary actions,” Slesin said.

Read full article.

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Infertility and Men

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Infertility is a problem for 15 percent of couples trying to have a baby. Problems with the man in the family can account for a large percent of the problem.

Mike, Danielle and 9 month old Ava are a lovely family. It’ll be Mike’s first Father’s Day, and a special one. It took five years for the Mateos to conceive a child.

“It’s going to be overwhelming especially after hearing that it might not have happened for us. It makes it all the more special,” Mike said.

The Mateos spent four years and a lot of money. They went through many procedures without success. Enough to frustrate any couple.

“We just didn’t want to hear that we couldn’t have a child,” Mike said.

So they went for a second opinion with Dr. Hyacinth brown. She found that Danielle had an immune system problem that was hampering pregnancy, and that Mike had a low sperm count.

Read full article.

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Unhealthy Lifestyle May Not Affect Sperm Count

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Men who smoke or drink or even do drugs may not be jeopardizing their fertility, says new study. Researchers say that unhealthy lifestyle might not affect the swimming sperms men produce.

“Despite lifestyle choices being important for other aspects of our health, our results suggest that many lifestyle choices probably have little influence on how many swimming sperm they ejaculate. For example, whether the man was a current smoker or not was of little importance. The proportion of men who had low numbers of swimming sperm was similar whether they had never been a smoker or a smoker who was currently smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day. Similarly, there was little evidence of any risk associated with alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Andrew Povey from the University of Manchester’s School of Community Based Medicine.

Read full article.

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All the King’s Men: How to Put a Vas Deferens Back Together Again

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Of the 500,000 people every year who get vasectomies, about 5 to 10 percent change their minds after the fact. The procedure, which sterilizes men by severing the tube supplying sperm to the urethra, was once considered a permanent operation. And in fact, doctors still generally discourage undoing a vasectomy. But, as MSNBC reports, technological advances and expanding coverage for vasectomy reversals among health insurance companies are leading to a rise in “unsnipping”:

“Insurance companies are beginning to cover vasectomy reversals because the success rate of reversals is as good — if not better — than in vitro fertilizations (for women), in terms of live pregnancies,” said Dr. Natan Bar-Chama, a male infertility specialist and urologist at Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York.

With the renewed interest in the tongue twistingly-named vasovasostomy, it’s worth exploring just how these things work. Despite the common belief that you cannot splice once you’ve sliced, there are actually two ways patients can have their vas deferens restored to their former, intact state.

The first method is relatively simple….

Read full article.