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Male fertility going down?
A new report from the European Science Foundation says that male infertility is on the rise. Over the last 50 years, sperm counts have dropped significantly. Surprisingly, the report says that 20% of men between the ages of 18-25 have sperm in the “subfertile” range.
According to the report, 10% of couples worldwide are considered infertile. The National Institutes of Health says that when a couple cannot conceive, one third of the time the issue lies with the woman’s reproductive system, one third of the time with the man’s. The final third is both or neither, without a pinpointed cause.
Why are men becoming less fertile?
The European report says that male reproductive health has been steadily declining, due to obesity, smoking, and prenatal factors. For example, if a man smokes, his sperm quality is affected. And it’s significantly affected if his mother smoked while pregnant.
The NIH states the following reasons for male infertility: Continue reading »
Pioneer of in vitro fertilization wins Nobel prize
Today, the 2010 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to Robert Edwards, the 85-year-old British scientist who pioneered the in-vitro fertilization technique, which has gone on to help four million women around the world have a baby.
It took Edwards and his colleague Dr. Steptoe two decades of basic biology research — studying the life cycle of the human egg and figuring out how to help egg and sperm mature and unite outside the body — to make the procedure possible. One in 10 couples has fertility problems, and the in-vitro method has been one of the most widely used and effective ways of helping them.
But when the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978, not everyone saw it as a good thing. Continue reading »
IVF makes boys more likely than girls
A study in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology finds that women using in vitro fertilization are more likely to have a boy. The research looked at data from almost 14,000 births following fertility treatments in Australia and New Zealand between 2002 and 2006.
The odds of having a boy went from 51 out of 100 births (with natural conception) to 56 out of 100 after IVF. And the longer the wait before the fertilized egg was implanted, the higher the odds of having a boy.
One caveat is that if a couple uses a specific fertility treatment — ICSI, in which a single sperm is selected and used to fertilize the IVF egg — the odds of having a boy decreased slightly below normal.
We know that the environment can tip the gender balance slightly — like the case I talked about earlier today of natural disasters leading to more girls, for example. Continue reading »
Does IVF Make Kids Smart?
A new research study found that children conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF) scored higher than other kids on reading, language, math and vocabulary tests. How is that possible? Continue reading »
When considering whether or not a woman is a good candidate for IVF, should obesity be a factor?
In a new position statement, The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology suggests that obesity could be a factor in decided whether a woman was healthy enough for IVF, alongside other lifestyle factors like excessive drinking and smoking.
If you have an IVF baby, or care about one, an important person to your family building has passed away. Dr. Fred Wirth, a neonatologist who cared for the first US baby born via an in vitro fertilization process, died Oct. 5 at the age of 68. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
It was Wirth who pronounced that baby, Elizabeth Carr, healthy and normal in a nationally televised news conference on the day she was born in 1981. As common as IVF is now, back then there were grave concerns about what would happen with these “test-tube babies.” Continue reading »
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