The
experts say sedentary lifestyles lower sperm production, while cheap and
saturated fats found in junk food are known to harm sperm counts. They are
warning that more men will become infertile over time, threatening the future. A
man’s sperms carry half the genetic material necessary to make a complete human
being. A woman’s egg holds the other half.
But
this alarm in reproductive health circles is not new. All over the world,
reports of declining sperm quality and increasing male infertility attributable
to low sperm count and poor sperm motility and morphology have been making the
rounds. The typical African, Asian, American or European male has been battling
declining sperm quality for decades.
In
2017, health experts warned that the human species could face extinction, after
facts emerged that the average sperm count in Western countries had more than
halved in a generation.
The
latest findings reveal that men’s sperm quality is falling every year due
mainly to unhealthy health habits and sedentary lifestyle and health experts
are worried that modern life is destroying male fertility.
One
study by fertility clinics established that the number of active sperm in men’s
semen sample drops 1.8 per cent each year. Another study found that male
fertility is declining in five out of six American cities. The new findings
were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive
Medicine in Denver, Colorado. The findings compelled the issuance of a public
health warning that junk food, lack of exercise and pollution may be fueling
the spermaggeddon (sperm death) crisis.
Researchers
led by the Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia and fertility clinic
IVIRMA monitored almost 120,000 men seeking treatment for fertility problems in
Spain and the US from 2002 to 2017. The men were put into three groups based on
the millions of swimming sperm in their semen samples.
“Fertility
clinics found that the number of moving sperm—or ‘swimmers’—in men’s samples
has dropped by 1.8 per cent each year. Measuring ‘swimmers’ is seen as a better
way of judging fertility than sperm count alone. Among American men in the most
fertile group, who had more than 15 million moving sperm, this went down by 1.8
per cent for each year of the study.
Between
2002 and 2005, 84.7 per cent of men were in the most fertile group, but this
fell to 79.1 per cent between 2014 and 2017. At the same time, the proportion
of the least fertile men rose. Those with poor fertility, from five million
swimming sperm to none, increased from less than 9 per cent of the total to
11.6 per cent.
Co-author
of the study, Dr. James Hotaling,
stated: “We did not expect to see the same fall in sperm quality in Spain
and the US. If this trend continues, there is potential for more men to become
infertile.”
A UK
expert, Professor Charles Kingsland,
of CARE fertility, also said: “Our change to a more sedentary lifestyle has no doubt had an
effect, as has our diet because men tend to eat far more rubbish than they did
a generation ago.”
The
second study, led by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York,
involved more than 2,500 sperm donors. It found that fertility declined over 11
years in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Boston, Houston and Indianapolis. New York was
the only one of the six cities studied to buck the trend.
Sedentary
lifestyles are believed to lower sperm production, while cheap and saturated
fats found in junk food are known to harm sperm counts. Bisphenol, a (BPA),
widely used in plastic wrappers and containers, is known to be toxic to sperm. Sperm
counts have been on the decline for more than 50 years and many factors are
responsible. The trend is essentially a reflection of the inherently
detrimental effect to sperm production of environmental and lifestyle changes
over the past half century or more.
Increasingly,
experts have been reporting incidences of men with genetically fragile sperms.
Such sperm have fragmented DNA chains, which make them to be of low quality and
less capable of fertilisation. While it was thought that the problem was only
genetic in nature, it is now known that lifestyle issues are involved.
“We are
seeing more men who are having bad sperms, weak sperms and abnormal sperms, and
there is a real need to explore a suitable intervention to meet the growing
proportion of men that need help in this direction,” noted
a fertility treatment specialist. “There are many things in the environment causing what is
described as oestrogenisation of men. Things such as paint, exposure to petrol
and even insecticides can affect sperm count. Men working in fuel stations, for
instance, are known to suffer from low sperm counts.”
According
to another fertility expert, “Our grandfathers had higher sperm count than our fathers who
had higher sperm counts than our generation. A common theory is that the male
of our species is getting exposed to a lot more female hormones than ever,
basically due to a lot of xerophenes in the atmosphere. These xerophenes have
female hormone oestrogen-like effects and exposure of males to them could be
deleterious.”
Clinical
records show that in Nigeria, 25 percent of couples are infertile, and that
half of the causes are due to male factor issues. To illustrate the continuing
decline of male fertility in the modern world, French researchers once
conducted a study on French men aged 18-70, tracking their average sperm counts
across the country between 1989 and 2005. Their findings showed a drop in sperm
counts among all French men in this age range, of about 1.9 percent per year on
average, and by 32.3 percent on average over the course of the 16-year period
studied, while the number of normally-shaped sperm dropped by 33.4 percent
during the study period.
“This
constitutes a serious public health warning,” said Dr. Joelle Le Moal, an environmental health epidemiologist and one
of the researchers. Le Moal said the downward trend observed in the study
clearly illustrates a perpetual decline in male fertility, which more than
likely extended far outside the borders of France and around the world. Based
on the figures, average sperm concentrations dropped from 73.6 million per
milliliter (mi/mL) among 35-year-old men in 1989 to 49.9 mi/mL among the same
age group in 2005, highlighting a disastrous situation.
Do
you have issues or delay in getting pregnant? You do not need to worry about
it. Just contact the best fertility specialist in Nigeria, Dr. Michael Ogunkoya (+2348033069466) for
counseling. He was trained in the
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The Hope Valley Fertility Clinic
Plot 31, Block 113,
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Lagos-Epe Express Way, Lagos.
+2348033069466
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