They contain high levels of Vitamin C, a key nutrient in male fertility, and magnesium, which is involved in the production of testosterone.
Tag: male fertility
Gene Affects Sperm’s Ability
A gene known to affect hormone action in breast and prostate cancer cells has now been proven to have an impact on male fertility, according to research by a team including cancer specialists from The University of Western Australia.
Men With Lots of Brothers Are More Fertile, Have Faster Swimming Sperm
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.
Male Fertility Countdown
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.
‘Missing’ protein can kick-start male fertility
Adding a missing protein to in fertile human sperm can ‘kick-start’ its ability to fertilise an egg and dramatically increase the chances of a successful pregnancy, a new study has claimed.
Researchers from Cardiff University have found that sperm transfers a vital protein, known as PLC-zeta (PLCz), to the egg upon fertilisation.
This sperm protein initiates a process called ‘egg activation’ which sets off all the biological processes necessary for development of an embryo. Read full article.
Finally, the Promise of Male Birth Control in a Pill: Compound Makes Mice Reversibly Infertile
ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2012) — Researchers have finally found a compound that may offer the first effective and hormone-free birth control pill for men. The study in the August 17th Cell, a Cell Press publication, shows that the small molecule makes male mice reversibly infertile without putting a damper on their sex drive. When the animals stop taking this new form of birth control, their sperm rebound and they are again able to sire perfectly healthy offspring.
“This compound produces a rapid and reversible decrease in sperm count and motility with profound effects on fertility,” said James Bradner of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the lead author of the study.
A male birth control pill hasn’t been easy to come by in large part because of the challenge of getting any drug across the blood:testis barrier, where it can reach the sperm-generating cells. That lack of contraceptive alternatives for men is partially responsible for the high rate of unplanned pregnancies. Despite the unsatisfactory options for male contraception, nearly one-third of couples rely on male-directed birth control methods. Read full article.
Stop Our Sperm, Please
Meet the men who want better male birth control – and want it badly
Lenny Smalls, whose Facebook page says he lives in Chicago and works as a transportation analyst, is very interested in long-acting, reversible male contraception. According to his posts on a fan page for one form being tested — known as RISUG or Vasalgel — Smalls is sufficiently frustrated by the pace of such drugs coming to the U.S. market to have begun personally testing an Indonesian herbal product called gandarusa.
“I plan to become the guinea pig and test this products effect on myself and my sperm,” he wrote recently. “I will take 1 pill daily and record how I feel everyday. After 30 days, I will see my doctor and have my sperm tested to see if it was effected by the supplement.” Earlier this week, Smalls’ plan ran into a hitch when the first doctor he saw refused to cooperate. (Smalls did not respond to interview requests, though he did agree to friend this reporter on Facebook.)
The Journey to the Center of the Uterus
There is very little know as to why just 1% of the 300 million sperms released by a man during sex manages to reach their partner’s uterus, while just a few dozen reach the egg. It is generally termed as the race of the fittest that out of millions of sperms only one will win the race and rest would perish.
Gel to Boost Male Fertility Being Developed
Male fertility has been largely overlooked until recently with most treatments requiring women to take medication or undergo expensive and invasive procedures.