Male Infertility

When a couple sits in front of me for the first time, they expect that I will find a problem with a female partner. But they're surprised to find out that in 40% of the cases, the problem lies with a male partner partially or completely. Male infertility is very prevalent, and in fact, surprisingly, it's become more and more prevalent over the years. So that nowadays I find many more men with fertility problems than I used to see 20 and 30 years ago. The reason is not completely clear but may have to do with environmental factors, for example, exposure to certain chemicals and other reasons why male infertility is more common. Anytime when sperm is checked and found, the parameters are found to be below what is considered normal, we call it male infertility. It may be an associated female infertility factor, but at this point, male infertility is what we address. We look at parameters such as sperm concentration, volume of sperm, the shape of the sperm, and the movement. Those are the main parameters. And that's quite simple test to perform and gives us a diagnosis in a very rapid fashion. The reasons for male infertility are primarily related to either obstruction, in which case we tend to refer the male to a urologist for evaluation. Other reasons are hormonal. In many of those cases, we can help those men achieve normal sperm. In some men, the reason is intake of certain medications, such as anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, and simply stopping intake of those drugs can restore the sperm to normal. We in this office have been able to address additional parameter of male infertility that has been ignored for the most part, and that is the sperm DNA fragmentation. We have been testing for DNA fragmentation within the sperm of man for the past 15 years, and in many cases where the sperm was considered normal in a regular sperm test, we found the abnormality was lying within the sperm in the DNA, and we were able to correct that by subjecting the sperm to certain solutions in the laboratory, or in extreme cases, we can correct that by obtaining sperm directly from the testicles.