fertility

Stud Study: Sperm Quality Better In Athletes, Worse In Heavy TV-Watchers

sperm

Guys, anybody need a boost off the couch in the wake of the Super Bowl? Here you go: A new study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health suggests that turning off your TV and getting back into playing sports rather than just watching them could be good for your sperm quality.

The study, just out online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, surveyed 189 college-age men at the University of Rochester about their exercise and TV habits, along with health-related questions about diet, smoking and stress. It also analyzed their semen quality.

Lead author Audrey Gaskins, a Harvard doctoral student, sums up the results: “Men who were in the top category of physical activity, which translated into 15 hours or more per week, had 73 percent higher sperm counts than those who exercised for less than five hours a week.”

“Then we looked at TV-watching and found that the men who watched the most TV — more than 20 hours per week — had 44% lower sperm counts compared to men who watched almost no TV. Our results show that modifiable lifestyle factors — physical activity and TV watching — could have a big impact on sperm count.”

Research over the last several years has suggested that semen quality has been declining in most Western countries. Gaskins says the new study’s motivation was to determine whether sedentary lifestyles might explain that decline. It controlled for several other factors that might have been at work, including stress levels, smoking and diet. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, exercise, fertility, harvard school of public health, why to exercise today

June 4, 2012 | 12:53 PM | Carey Goldberg

Getting Better At Predicting Twins: Boston IVF Study

twins
This is the longstanding in-vitro-fertilization dilemma: You’ve made your embryos in the lab. A few look good. Now, how many do you transfer into the would-be mother? If you transfer just one, it may fail to grow and she won’t get pregnant at all. If you transfer two or more, she may end up with twins or higher multiples, with the added risks they bring.

Now, a new paper just out in the journal Fertility and Sterility reports that it’s possible to predict with much-improved accuracy just how likely a given couple is to have twins. It finds striking differences in the chances that a given patient will have twins if two embryos are transferred, ranging from about 12% to about 55%.

You can just imagine how the statistical tool the researchers used — which belongs to a private company, Univfy — could play out in clinic conversations: “Ms. Jones, we could transfer two embryos, but you’d then have a 55% chance of having twins. Perhaps we should do a single-embryo transfer?”

What affects the chances of twins? The study’s press release says: “Variables that most affected chances of multiple birth among the Boston IVF patients studied include age, number of four-cell embryos, total motile sperm, serum peak estradiol level, and Day 3 FSH levels.” (Those last two are hormones in the woman.)

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, fertility, pregnancy

February 7, 2012 | 10:15 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Checking Your Sperm Count With Help From The Local Pharmacy

Is your sperm up to the task?

Soon, along with picking up prescriptions and getting a flu shot, men will be able to purchase a quick fertility test at the neighborhood drugstore.

Bloomberg reports that starting in April, Walgreen’s and CVS will sell a new product, SpermCheck, which will enable men to determine if they are fertile enough to get women pregnant. It’s being marketed as a way to “bridge the fertility gap” in which the burden is currently on women to establish their fertility.

In April, Walgreen’s 7,800 U.S. stores plan to start selling a fertility test that determines if a man is producing enough sperm to get a woman pregnant. Walgreen and CVS have already started selling SpermCheck Fertility online.

The blue-and-gold box, which features a smiling couple holding a newborn, will join more than two dozen varieties of female fertility tests in Walgreen stores. SpermCheck’s owner and distributor, closely held ContraVac Inc., is banking on women dropping an extra $40 for the test when they buy ovulation and pregnancy kits for themselves. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, fertility, pharmacies, sperm count

December 1, 2011 | 10:21 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

The Yoga Effect: When Older Women Overestimate Their Fertility

Has yoga and better health made older women ignore their biological clocks?

The storyline in a bunch of recent articles suggests that older women have become somewhat delusional about their ability to get pregnant, wrongly assuming that good health and sexy biceps can trump the hard deadline imposed by their own biological clocks. Blame it on yoga, among other culprits, which makes us look and feel younger and helps us harbor illusions of nearly eternal fertility.

The most recent piece — based on a survey sponsored by the drug maker EMD Serono — ran on NPR today.

It found that women seem to be clueless that getting pregnant after 30 or 35 can be extremely tough and rife with complications (which, incidentally, is the title of The New Yorker article written a few years back by the late feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein about giving birth to a daughter at age 48. An excellent new biography of Wasserstein, by former Wall Street Journal reporter Julie Salamon, offers additional sad and chilling details about Wasserstein’s secretive pregnancy, her death at age 55 and the little girl, Lucy Jane, she left behind. Just to be clear, the yoga effect did not play into Wasserstein’s late-in-life pregnancy — other forces were at work. Read the book.)

Here’s a bit of the NPR piece:

The fastest-growing rates of childbearing are for those 40 and older. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, fertility, pregnancy, women's health

February 25, 2011 | 1:15 PM | Carey Goldberg

Study: Stress During Fertility Treatment Does Not Hinder Pregnancy

No question, trying to get pregnant can be stressful. There’s an outcome you desperately want, and — aside from “trying” in the bedroom or the fertility clinic — there’s not much you can do to make it happen. Little wonder that would-be mothers get a lot of stress-relief advice. And it sometimes crosses over into “If you can just relax, that will help you have a baby.”

Not so, says a new paper just out in BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. It analyzed 14 previous studies of more than 3,500 women in fertility treatment, looking at the relationship between stress and successful pregnancy.

The conclusion: “Women undergoing IVF or other assisted reproduction therapy can be reassured that emotional distress caused by their infertility or other life events will not prevent the treatment from working.”

From the press release:

The authors, led by Professor Jacky Boivin from the Cardiff Fertility Studies Research Group, investigated links between the success of fertility treatment and stress by undertaking a large scale review (meta-analysis) of related research.

Fourteen studies with 3,583 infertile women undergoing a cycle of fertility treatment were included in the review. The women were assessed before fertility treatment for anxiety and stress. The authors then compared data for women who achieved pregnancy and those who did not.

The results show that emotional distress was not associated with whether or not a woman became pregnant.

Professor Boivin therefore argues that “these findings should reassure women that emotional distress caused by fertility problems or other life events co-occurring with treatment will not compromise their chance of becoming pregnant”.

But Alice Domar, author of “Conquering Infertility” and director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Waltham, questions the study’s findings: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, fertility, pregnancy, stress

October 28, 2010 | 3:26 PM | Rachel Zimmerman

BPA Linked To DNA Damage In Sperm

Researchers found evidence linking the chemical BPA to sperm damage

In what is being called “the first piece of epidemiologic evidence” that links the ubiquitous bisphenol A (BPA) to problems in human semen, Nature online reports on a study that finds exposure to the chemical (widely used in plastic bottles and other products) causes DNA damage in sperm.

De-Kun Li, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, California, says that while his new work may not provide enough evidence to ban BPA, consumers should now consider taking steps to limit their exposure.

Earlier this year, another team found a “preliminary association” between BPA and DNA damage in sperm, adding to previous evidence from animal studies that linked the chemical to fertility problems.

Writing in Fertility and Sterility, Li’s team say they have now obtained “the first piece of epidemiologic evidence” showing BPA impacts on human semen quality. Their study of 514 factory workers in China found that those with a detectable level of the chemical in their urine had an increased risk of lower semen quality than their non-exposed contemporaries.

“When you see this kind of association with semen you have to wonder what else BPA has an effect on,” says Li. As a precautionary principle, he adds, “Everybody should avoid BPA as much as you can.”