26th May, 2014
Eromosele Ebhomele
The problems caused by infertility in men seems to be multiple. Apart from its psychological effect on the victim and his family where he is married, a medical report has confirmed that men who are infertile because of defects in their semen appear to be at increased risk of dying sooner than men with normal semen.
The study carried out by a team led by a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Michael Eisenberg, found that men with two or more abnormalities in their semen were more than twice as likely to die over a roughly eight-year period as men who had normal semen.
The greater the number of abnormalities in the semen, the higher the death rate, said the study which also found that one in seven couples has had an abnormality in the developed world.
As published in the Sunday edition of E!Science News, Eisenberg, an Assistant Professor of Urology, lamented that the world’s focus is more on smoking and diabetes, both of which doubles mortality risk, but “here we’re seeing the same doubled risk with male infertility, which is relatively understudied.”
Titled ‘Semen Quality, Infertility and Mortality in the USA,’ the team studied records of 11,935 men aged between 20 and 50 from two clinics. The study involved checking for total semen volume and sperm counts, motility and shape.
Out of the figure, 69 died during follow-up periods with their median age put at 36.6 years.
Eisenberg said of the study: “we were able to determine with better than 90 percent accuracy who died during that follow-up time…In the years following their evaluation, men with poor semen quality had more than double the mortality rate of those who didn’t.”
The report said though no single semen abnormality in itself predicted mortality, those with two or more such abnormalities had a great risk of death compared with those with no semen abnormalities.
Eisenberg explained that infertility may be caused by pre-existing general health problems adding that these health problems increased the death rate.
The researchers believe this report is going to stir up many controversies in the nearest future.