Semen count among males around the world is dropping at an accelerated rate after halving during the last forty years, a major new study published Tuesday discovered, calling for action to prevent the decline.
The study was headed by Israeli epidemiologist Hagai Levine, who revised 2017 research which had come under review just for New Zealand, Europe, North America and Australia.
The study, released today, consists of information from over 57,000 men from more than 223 studies across fifty three nations, which makes it the biggest meta-analysis of the topic to date.
It validated the 2017 finding that sperm counts have halved in the last 4 years, with the inclusion of new places.
Between 1973 to 2018, the concentration of semen in males not found to be infertile dropped by over 51 %, from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen, the new study found.
‘information indicate that this global decline is proceeding at an accelerated pace in the 21st century,” it stated in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction Update.
Sperm counts are falling at each rate of more or less 1.1 percent a year, the study discovered.
“More action as well as investigation is essential to avoid further disruption of male reproductive health,” he said.
“We genuinely don’t understand exactly why Sperm count isn’t the sole factor that impacts fertility. the pace of Sperm movement, which wasn’t assessed in this particular research, is also essential.
And also the reduced sperm concentration of forty nine million continues to be well above the number deemed “normal” by the World Health Organization – somewhere between 15 million as well as 200 million sperm per milliliter.
Dr Sarah Martins da Silva, a specialist in reproductive Medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland, said the research demonstrated that the rate of decrease in sperm counts had doubled since 2000.
“we really don’t understand why,” she said.
“Exposure to pollution, plastics, smoking, drugs and prescribed medication in addition to lifestyle factors including poor diet and obesity have all been suggested to be contributing factors, even though the consequences are poorly understood & ill-defined.
Some other experts have been suspicious about the 2017 review, saying it didn’t resolve their doubts.
“I continue to be worried about the quality of the information in the documents which were published, especially in the far past,” on which the evaluation is based, Allan Pacey of the UK’s University of Sheffield told AFP.
Pacey praised the study’s “very elegant meta-analysis” and also said he thinks we’ve “simply gotten better” in the challenging task of counting sperm, which may explain the dropping rates.
However Martins da Silva dismissed critics of the study’s results, stating that “the amounts as well as uniform results are hard to dismiss.’
