Tag: sperm

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Saturated fat tied to sinking sperm counts in Danes

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Saturated fats, like those found in rich cheeses and meats, may do more than weigh men down after a meal – a new study also links them to dwindling sperm counts.

Researchers found that young Danish men who ate the most saturated fats had a 38 percent lower concentration of sperm and 41 percent lower sperm counts in their semen than those who ate the least fat.

“We cannot say that it has a causal effect, but I think other studies have shown that saturated fat intake has shown a connection to other problems and now also for sperm count,” said Tina Jensen, the study’s lead author from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen.

The new research is not the first to connect diet and other lifestyle factors to sperm production and quality.

In 2011, Brazilian researchers found eating more grains – such as wheat, oats or barley – was associated with improved sperm concentration and motility, and fruit was also linked to a speed and agility boost in sperm (see Reuters Health story of November 18, 2011 here: http://reut.rs/TBfCrA).

But that study and most others looked at these associations using data on men seeking fertility treatments, which may not be representative of all men. Read full article.

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Aging Sperm? Not the End of the World

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Judith Shulevitz’s recent New Republic essay on how later parenthood is “upending American society” claims that delaying kids could lead us down a rabbit hole of genetic decline. The piece gathers much of its energy from new studies suggesting that male sperm quality decays with age.

While female infertility is old news (literally), issues with male fertility create a new cultural frisson. Apparently, genetic errors may be introduced into sperm every time they divide—which is often. So the children of some older men may have issues, cognitive and physical, that the kids of younger men don’t generally face (at least not due to their dad’s contribution to their DNA).

There’s a lot of emphasis on the word “may” in the New Republic piece—since most of the evidence it’s based on is inconclusive. And there’s a strong element of anecdote as well. Fertility catastrophizing is an ongoing sport. For instance, here are some other fertility scaremongering pieces of the past few years which turned out to be not the big problems the headlines suggested: the ovarian reserve scare; the later-parenthood autism scare; the childlessness scare; earlier this month we had the low-birth-rate scare (which turns out to really be about young women delaying kids in order to establish themselves—atime-lag effect). Read full article.

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Men With Lots of Brothers Are More Fertile, Have Faster Swimming Sperm

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Looking for Mr. Right to start a big family with? Science says you should start by counting how many brothers he has.

Scientists say that the more brothers a man has, the greater his baby-making potential, after discovering a link between the swimming speed of a man’s sperm with the number of male siblings in his family.

The latest findings, published in the Asian Journal of Andrology, add to a previous theory that parents with genes for good male fertility are more likely to have boys. If the theory is correct, it seems Americans have excellent male fertility genes. According to the latest report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more boys than girls are being born in the United States, and there were exactly 94,232 more male births than female births in the U.S. in 2004.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield compared the traveling speed of 500 men with their family make-up.

The study found that the greater number of brothers rather than sisters a man has, the faster his sperm, and faster sperm is associated with greater fertility. Researchers noted that having mostly brothers can also indicate that the man’s parents have strong male fertility genes and that they could have passed it on to him.

“The results are very surprising and could provide genetic insights into why some men are more fertile than others but at the moment have no clinical relevance to how we might manage and treat male infertility,” researcher Dr. Allan Pacey, of the University of Sheffield, said in a statement. Read full article.

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Male Fertility Countdown

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Yet another study suggests sperm numbers are falling in rich countries.

AS HEALTH scares go, the idea that sperm counts are plummeting across the industrialised world, probably as a result of chemical pollution that has an adverse hormonal effect, takes some beating. In 1992 a meta-analysis of 61 papers, published in the British Medical Journal, suggested they had fallen by half in the preceding half-century, from 113m per millilitre of semen to 66m. Since then, the decline has apparently continued. The most recent paper, just published in Human Reproduction, by Joëlle le Moal, Matthieu Rolland and their colleagues at France’s Institute for Public Health Surveillance, is also one of the most comprehensive yet.

Its conclusions are stark. The sperm count of the average Frenchman, say the researchers, fell by 32.2% between 1989 and 2005. At the same time, the proportion of properly formed sperm also fell, from 60.9% to 52.8%.

This paper is an important contribution to a lively debate. For although the idea of falling sperm counts has entered the public mind as an established fact, fertility experts remain divided about just how big the effect really is. Not all studies have found drops. Though one of Parisians in 1995 suggested that counts were indeed falling, by about 2.1% a year, another, carried out in Toulouse, suggested that they weren’t. Read full article.

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The Sperm Whisperer

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Young whippersnappers tap iPads while old men work sudoku puzzles, shifting uneasily in their seats.Orthopedic footwear mingles with hipster skinny jeans as a battle of bifocals and vanity glasses unfolds in a Murray Hill waiting room.

The mood is anxious as men both vernal and venerable wait to see urologist and superstar sperm doc Joseph Alukal.

Until three months ago, things were status quo for the 37-year-old fertility phenom, who typically addresses issues like performance anxiety, cancer and sexual dysfunction.

But a recent landmark study in the science journal Nature, linking advanced paternal age with higher incidents of autism and other maladies in offspring, has sent young New York men into a tailspin. And their little swimmers straight to Alukal’s test tubes.

“People keep asking me, ‘Doc, should I freeze my sperm? What if I meet the right girl 10 or 15 years from now?'” says Dr. Alukal, director of male reproductive health at NYU Langone Medical Center.

“It’s absolutely something I’m seeing more of in my office.”

Nearly two dozen men have come in since the research came out, and “more than 50 percent of the guys who come to me actually do it,” he says. Read full article.

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French men not producing as much sperm

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(Reuters Health) – When it comes to sperm counts, French men aren’t what they used to be, according to a new study.

Researchers found that between 1989 and 2005, the number of sperm in one milliliter of the average 35-year-old Frenchman’s semen fell from about 74 million to about 50 million – a decrease of roughly 32 percent.

“That’s certainly within the normal range, but if you think about it, if there continues to be a decrease, we would expect that we’ll get into that infertile range,” said Grace Centola, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology in Birmingham, Alabama.

And the French aren’t the only ones who should be concerned, the researchers said.

“A decline in male reproduction endpoints has been suspected for several decades and is still debated all around the world. Geographical differences have been observed between countries, and between areas inside countries,” said Joëlle Le Moal from the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in France, who led the study.

Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, Le Moal’s team said global analyses have found decreases in sperm counts, as did recent studies in Israel, India, New Zealand and Tunisia.

Centola, who wasn’t involved with the new research, told Reuters Health she had also found similar results in a group of young sperm donors from Boston in the United States. Read full article.

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Nano-fabric defends against HIV and sperm

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U. WASHINGTON (US) — Scientists have developed an electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers that can simultaneously prevent HIV and offer contraception.

As reported in PLOS ONE, the cloth can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete, and reversible protection.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” says corresponding author Kim Woodrow, assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

Electrospinning uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength, and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets, or pills. Read full article.

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Flying Solo: More Women Abandon Search for Prince Charming and Opt to Have IVF Baby

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SINGLE women in their late 30s are increasingly giving up waiting for ”Mr Right” and turning instead to IVF or assisted reproductive technology (ART) to fulfil their dream of having a baby.

IVF clinics in Sydney and Melbourne report the number of women using donor sperm to conceive a child has jumped 10 per cent over the past three years. An IVF Australia fertility specialist, Michael Chapman, said that, while lesbian couples accounted for some of the increase, the real growth was occurring with older, single heterosexual women.

”We’re seeing more and more of these ladies. Women who can’t find Mr Right but still want a child realise this is an option,” Professor Chapman said. ”It’s become almost normal to be a single mum. So when these women get to 38, 39, they go to donor sperm and do assisted reproduction.”

Categorised by the IVF industry as ”socially infertile”, these women rely on their mother, sister or a friend to support them through the IVF process in the absence of a partner. Read full article.

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Sperm Length Variation Could Mean Fertility Problems

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Sperm length variation is an indication of problems with fertility, and men who have a broad range of different sperm lengths, especially in the flagellum, have a decreased chance of being able to reproduce and lower numbers of sperm that can swim well , according to a new study conduction by Brown University researchers and published in the journal Human Reproduction.

Jim Mossman, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar at Brown University, commented:

“Our study reveals that men who produce higher concentrations of competent swimming sperm also demonstrate less variation in the size and shape of those sperm. It suggests that in some cases, tests are working more optimally to produce high numbers of consistently manufactured sperm, and vice versa.”

Mossman and his team measured the flagella, middles, and heads of 30 sperm per person from 103 men who were chosen at random out of 500 individuals who had previously been enlisted in another substantial fertility study.

The team also measured other sperm factors that the WHO (World Health Organization) claims are important fertility indicators, such as concentration and motility. Read full article.