In Vitro Fertility Goddess

Latest News  

SEPTEMBER 2008

Perfumes Toxic to Pregnancy and Can Lead to Infertility in Boys

UK Fertility Clinics Call for Single Embryo Implant

Wednesday 3 September, 2008 

Source: British Fertility Society

Experts from the British Fertility Society and the Association of Clinical Embryologists have called on fertility clinics to mainly use single embryos for women younger than 37 to reduce a rate of multiple births.

The call is aimed at helping Britain's fertility clinics meet the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's three-year target to cut multiple pregnancy rates by more than half over the next three years. Currently, there were 11,262 children born through IVF treatment last year of whom 4,000 were twins.

Multiple pregnancies and births are the single biggest risk for women during fertility treatment because they increase the likelihood of premature birth miscarriage, long-term health problems for the child and can also endanger the mother's health.

Out of the more than 3.5 million babies born worldwide using assisted reproductive technology in the past 30 years, most since have been born to women aged between 30 and 39.

The move for single embryo implantation in Britain follows is not an isolated case as some European governments have already legislated to outlaw multiple implants reduce pregnancy risks.

The HFEA wants women younger than 37 who produce high quality embryos to only receive a single transfer during their first cycle and to freezed the other embryos for use later.

Sarah Williams, IVFG Reporter 

Australian Didgerido Can Cause Infertilty in Girls  

IVF Barcodes to Avoid Mix Ups in Britain

Expert Tells women to Abort if Baby is Wrong Gender

Fertility Gene Masterswitch Disovered

AUGUST 2008

Fertility As Much About The Mind Than About The Body  

IVF and ICSI Treatments Induce Gene Mutations

Heated Car Seats Linked to Male Infertility

IVF Mother Sues Over Fertility Treatment Delay  

Male Infertility Linked to Gum Disease

Wednesday 21 August 2008

Source: Bikur Holim Hospital, Jerusalem

Men suffering from fertility problems should make an appointment with their periodontist immediately after scientists discovered a link between poor sperm gum infections.

Israeli researchers from Bikur Holim Hospital in Jerusalem found that infertile men are more likely to suffer from chronic gum infections than those with healthy sperm

After studying 56 men aged 23 to 52 who came to the hospital's fertility clinic lab for sperm analysis, they discovered that 65% of those with low sperm counts suffered from gingivitis, an early stage of gum infection, compared to only 48% of men with normal sperm. Their sperm also had less mobility. Meanwhile half of those survey with no sperm had chronic periodontitis.

Dr. Oshrat Shonberger, director of the hospital's fertility clinic, says periodontal treatment is not only good prevention against infertility in men but that eradicating gum infections may improve semen quality.

Gum infections have already been linked to heart disease, stroke, premature births and low-birth weight.

Early Drinking Impacts on Fertility Later in Life

Wednesday 20 August, 2008

Source: Alcoholism, Clinical & Experimental Research

Women who were heavy drinkers in their teens and early 20s may pay with their fertility later in life.

A study published in the journal Alcoholism, Clinical & Experimental Research says women who were early alcoholics had children at an older age.

Lead author Dr Gillian Lockwood believes that it is biologically plausible that alcohol's impact on fertility is because many reproductive hormones rely on cholesterol which is made in the liver.

Dr Lockwood says that her findings should send a warning to young women to consider what impact their drinking could have on their fertility later in life and that those who are considering having children should give up drinking altogether.

But some experts say the results should be viewed with a grain of salt as the study did not distinguish between cause and effect, that alcoholic women may have more difficulties finding a stable partner which delays them having children.

Steve Hillier, professor of Reproductive Endocrinology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Daily Telegraph that: "As always, the results of any study involving retrospective socio-demographic analysis like this need to be treated cautiously. However, if nothing else they are valuable in alerting us to the potentially deleterious impact of alcohol abuse on the female reproductive system."

Other fertility experts also believe that the emotional distress associated with fertility problems could mean that those women with fertility problems could be inclined to drink more to ease the pain.

Lesbians Win Right to Fertility Treatment

Number of Childless Women Over 40 Doubles

First IVF Ice Baby for Britain

Clomid Versus Sexy Lingerie

Thursday 7 August 2008

Source: University of Aberdeen

What's wrong with this sentence? ‘Fertility Treatments may not produce more babies'.

Well for starters, as the reproductive equivalent of ‘Osama Bin Laden may not have caused September 11', it instantly upends everything those of us struggling to reproduce have believed until now.

In news out of Scotland, Aberdeen to be specific, researchers studied 580 couples and came to that conclusion. But how did they go about it?

They divided the group into three.

First a placebo group who received no treatment, except, and I can hardly stand this, they were counselled on "the need to have regular sex".

‘And what, doctor, do you mean by regular sex?'

‘You know, sir, the, ah, penis in the, how shall I put it? Er, vagina..yes, vagina. That method.'

Stunned silence as couple look at each other, thinking, who would have thought?

So there was a second group who took Clomid and the other who had IUI (artificial insemination where the sperm is sent kicking and screaming into the womb via syringe).

At this point it must be pointed out that all of the couples had been diagnosed with ‘unexplained infertility', otherwise known as ‘the too-hard-basket'.

It was the results that surprised, well, everyone. Especially the doctors: there were 26 babies produced with the help of Clomid, 43 by IUI and an encouraging 32 produced by the people who'd apparently forgotten to have sex until they were reminded.

According to Allan Pacey, from the University of Sheffield, secretary of the British Fertility Society and king of the understatement, "It's not in the realm that you would expect it to be if these treatments were really performing."

Still, he conceded that IUI was useful in certain situations, especially with donor sperm.

Could this mean the end of Clomid as a fertility treatment? No, as it has long been linked to the successful pregnancies of women who have problems ovulating. Yet for others it may be more useful to spend the money on lingerie instead of filling a Clomid script.

Jodi Panayotov

IVF is Big Business in Australia

Older Women Responsible for Australia's Baby Boom

Cause of Endometriosis Discovered

Woman Told to Become Sterile Before Being Allowed to Give Birth

Sunday 3 August, 2008 

The Australian state of Victoria is facing a major legal quagmire after a woman, who wants to carry a baby for her infertile sister, must be sterilised along with her husband before she can undertake the surrogacy procedure.

Indeed, the radical step must be undertaken under Victoria's outdated surrogacy laws  whereby both the altruistic woman and her husband would have to become sterile before she would be allowed to become a surrogate mother.

The news has renewed calls for the state's decades-old fertility laws to be over overturned.

The Infertility Treatment Act states that only infertile individuals can access IVF.

The would-be mother who is infertile and in her in her early 40s slammed the laws describing them as mad.

"My sister kindly offered to be my surrogate - she already has a family - and we didn't think it was any big deal," said the woman, who did not want to be identified. She added that "our families are 100 per cent behind us and so initially we thought 'there's no reason why we can't do this".

The woman said her sister, aged in her 30s, and brother-in-law, should not have to contemplate sterilisation, given the sacrifices they were making.

Leading fertility experts agree, saying the changes to the state's fertility laws, first drafted in 1984, couldn't come soon enough as they discriminate against people who want to do surrogacy.

Meanwhile, Victoria's Law Reform Commission has recommended an overhaul of rules governing the state's assisted reproductive technology. 

*Read Robyn Riley's excellent editorial: Surrogate Laws make No Sense

Egg Donor Numbers Rise in Tough Economic Times

Jools Oliver to Have Fertility Treatment for the Third Time

JULY 2008

IVF Treatment Proven to Be Safe

Thursday 31 July, 2008

Source: The Lancet

Newborn babies conceived through IVF are much more likely to die at birth than those conceived naturally, according to new research.

But Dr Liv Bente Romundstad from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who led the study insists that complications associated with IVF are due to underlying fertility problems in the parents and not the fertility techniques used during treatment.

The study focused of more than 1.2 million births in Norway and found that there was an increased risk of still birth low, premature birth and low birth weight after fertility treatment.

The research published in the latest edition of the medical journal The Lancet discovered that infants born after fertility treatment were on average 25g smaller at birth, were born two days earlier and had a 31% increased risk of stillbirth.

But when the team took a closer look at a subgroup of 2,500 women who had had babies both naturally and through fertility treatment, they found no major difference in outcomes.

This suggests that the increased chance of complications may be due to the factors causing the fertility problems in the parents rather than in the fertility technology itself.

However, the study didn't look twins and triplets as they are known to be at increased risk of premature birth and low birth weight.

Dr Romundstad says that the results are reassuring on the basis that the IVF technology is safe.

But she believes that more research was needed to harness a better understanding of the causes behind infertility which may lead to problems during pregnancy and birth.

She suggested those problems could be related to hormone disturbances or inherent genetic defects in the parents, although those particular factors could vary for each and every couple experiencing fertility problems.

Infertility: ‘I Wish Somebody Could Have Told Me'

Fertility Treatment Link to Ovarian and Breast Cancer

Woman ‘Too Fat' for IVF Conceives Naturally

Reproductive Tourism has its Ups and Downs

2 Sets of Twins for Lesbian IVF Couple

Fertility Treatment Should be ‘Free'

Better Endometriosis Treatment Needed

Fertility Diet Can Freeze Biological Clock and Benefit Women in Their 40s and 50s

Monday 28 July, 2008

The influence of diet on fertility is often overlooked according to Sarah Dobbyn, the author of a new book called The Fertility Diet.

Lesbian IVF Negligence Case Dismissed

Thursday 24 July, 2008

Source: AAP, Reuters

An Australian lesbian couple has failed in its bid to sue their fertility doctor after one of them gave birth to twins instead of the single baby they had hoped for after undertaking fertility treatment.

The plaintiff was suing here her doctor for than $400,000 AUSD to cover the cost of raising one of the girls to the age of 21 including private school fees, about $15,000 to compensate for time off work, and an additional amount for medical expenses.

The birth mother of the twins, now aged four, had told the Supreme Court in Canberra that the doctor implanted two embryos even though she told him before IVF procedure that she wanted just one. The woman argued that she had lost her capacity to love and her relationship had suffered as she and her partner were distracted by the everyday chores involved in raising twins.

But the doctor's lawyer successfully argued that the loss of freedom was common to all parents, adding that the mother told him she wanted one baby only minutes before the procedure after previously consenting to having two embryos implanted.

The couple's solicitor says his clients were shocked by the court's decision while considering an appeal.

The case received widespread international coverage and saw the lesbian pair widely condemned when the lawsuit was launched last year, prompting them to issue a public statement saying their issue was with their doctor's conduct, not the children that resulted from it who they loved regardless.

Read Jenny Wills excellent commentary on this story here »

Lesbian IVF Case Shouldn't Have Gone to Court

Soy Products Linked to Male Fertility Problems

Thursday 24 July, 2008

Source: Human Reproduction

Men who consume as little as half a serving a day of soy-based foods could significantly lower their sperm count according to new research out the US today.

The study monitored the soy consumption of 99 men and discovered that those who consumed more than two portions of soy-based foods a week ended up on average with 41 million fewer sperm per millilitre of semen than men who had never eaten soy food.

Dr Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and author of the study published in this month's journal Human Reproduction said: "What we found was men that consume the highest amounts of soy foods in this study had a lower sperm concentration compared to those who did not consume soy foods."

Dr Chavarro added that studies in animals have linked high consumption of plant-derived estrogens known as isoflavones with infertility, but so far there has been little evidence of their effect in humans.

His team focused on the intake of 15 soy-based foods in 99 men who went to a fertility clinic between 2000 and 2006.

They were asked how much and how often in the prior three months they had eaten soy-rich foods including: tofu, tempeh, tofu or soy sausages, bacon, burgers and mince, soy milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream, and other soy products such drinks, powders and energy bars.

Because different foods have different levels of isoflavones in them, the researchers set a standard for serving sizes of particular foods. Then they divided the men into groups according to soy consumption levels. Men in the highest group on average ate half a serving per day.

"In terms of their isoflavone content that is comparable to having one cup of soy milk or one serving of tofu, tempeh or soy burgers every other day," Chavarro said.

The difference was striking. Men in the highest intake category had 41 million sperm per milliliter less than men who ate no soy foods. A normal sperm count ranges from 80 million and 120 million per milliliter, and a sperm count of 20 million per milliliter or below is considered low.

"It suggests soy foods could have some deleterious effect on the reproductive system and especially on sperm production," Chavarro said.
The researchers found the association between soy foods and lower sperm count was stronger in overweight men, which might suggest hormones are playing a role.

"Men who are overweight or obese tend to have higher levels of androgen-produced estrogen. They are converting a male hormone into a female hormone in their fat. The more body fat you have, the more estrogen you produce in your fat," Chavarro said.

Chavarro said the study was not sufficient to suggest that soy intake would have health implications such as inducing infertility. Much bigger studies would be needed to answer that question, he said.

New Procedure to Improve Male Fertility

Sperm Quality Can Improve in as Little as Two Months

Successful Birth after No Less than 8 Miscarriages

Male Link to Miscarriage

New Ovulation Gene to Boost Fertility

30th Anniversary for First IVF Baby

Risk to IVF Twins Exaggerated

Frozen Embryos Boost IVF Success

Acupuncture is No Boost For IVF Success

Embryo Fitness Test to Boost IVF Success

Doctors Concerned Over ICSI Treatment

Cancer Risk No Higher for IVF Mothers

Can Women Give Birth at 100?

Ovoid Coffee if Plagued by Fertility Problems

70 Year Old Woman Gives Birth to Twins

June 2008

NHS Denies IVF to Thousands of Infertile Couples

Smoking and IVF Don't Mix

Game Show Viewer Helps IVF Couple

IVF Right for Gay Couples in Ireland  

How To Protect Your Fertility

Fertility Package: ‘Procreation' is the New Craze

A World With No Children

Male Fertility Problems ‘inherited'

Wednesday 18 June, 2008

Source: American Journal of Epidemiology

Young men whose parents had fertility problems have been found to have poor sperm quality.

Researchers from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark looked at 311 men aged 18 to 21 and discovered that those who had the lowest sperm count and fewer normal-looking sperm were the children of parents who themselves took over a year to conceive.

They found that men with sub-fertile parents had a 22 % lower sperm count and a smaller percentage of structurally normal sperm than men born to fertile parents.

But the study was unable to establish whether the poorer sperm quality was related to inherited factors from the father, the mother or both.

The study confirms pervious studies which have found that fertility problems have at least some heritable causes.

If the findings of this study are confirmed and infertility is passed on from parents, it may lead to a significant rise in fertility problems as an increasing number of couple seek assisted reproduction treatment. Currently, almost 1 in 5 couples have difficulty conceiving in the western countries.

Lead researcher Dr Cecilia H. Ramlau-Hansen says that the "genes responsible for impaired sperm production would normally be eliminated by evolution but assisted reproduction technology interferes with this force of selection, and the long-term consequences are not known."

But she also acknowledges that her findings are based on a relatively small number of subjects and that further research would been needed to confirm the results.

IVF Parents ‘Right' to Choose Sex of Their Child

Male Sperm Collection Better Done at Home

Free Fertility Treatment for Texas Couple

A Successful Blastocyst Lies in its Genes

Egg Freezing Technique Just as ‘Safe' as IVF

IVF Babies and Genetic Problems

Pre-Implantation Genetic Screening or PSG Discouraged

When Life Without Children Is Not By Choice

Woman's Miscarriage After Her Arrest  

Feminism's Silence On Infertility

By Janet Albrechtsen

The Australian June 4, 2008

THE strategic silences of feminism are having profound effects on society. For all the brilliant choices ushered in for women - the freedom to forge ahead with careers, to stay single, if that was their wish, not to be tied down by family and babies, if that was their choice - feminism failed women by refusing to inform them that their new-found choices came at a price.

By failing to remind women about their biology and their declining fertility, feminism deliberately ignored the innate desire of most women to have a child. The silence continues. It is there in the classroom where, like previous generations of young girls, the present generation is still not taught that fertility cannot be taken for granted.

Fortunately, there are moves to fill in the silence about infertility. If it happens, it may allow young women to make more fully informed choices about work and babies, avoiding the sorrow that afflicted many of their childless forerunners.

Unlike women in the 1950s and '60s, the liberated generation of women that followed in the '70s and '80s had the world at their feet. Yet feminism's mantra of choice made little room for women who chose to eschew careers for babies.

If we are honest, feminism never had much time for babies. Having babies meant leaving the workplace, opting out of the career track, at least for a time. With its unwavering focus on encouraging women to make great strides in the professions, making their presence felt in the boardroom, the courtroom and parliament, the feminist movement deliberately ignored motherhood as a legitimate choice for women.

The cost of feminism's silence about fertility is etched in the faces of those women who pursued dazzling careers and carefree singledom but ended up childless such as ABC presenter Virginia Haussegger, who a few years ago openly wrote about the price she paid for listening to the feminist mothers, who encouraged us to reach for the sky but failed to tell us the truth about our biological clock. Said Haussegger: "Here we are, supposedly 'having it all' as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications, great jobs. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really." But something was missing. "I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase."

The cost of feminism's silence about infertility is engraved in the experiences of those who, having delayed motherhood and unable to conceive, underwent in-vitro fertilisation at a great physical and emotional cost. Women such as Jodi Panayotov, who described how her mental anguish at not becoming pregnant had her rifling through her rubbish bin to check whether the second line on her discarded pregnancy test had appeared in the hour since she threw it there along with dozens of others. "If I thought IVF would be the answer to both my reproductive issues and my mental issues, I was mistaken. Yes, it produced a baby. But it took ages to recover from the emotional toll."

Infertility affects one in six Australian couples. While the causes are many, a woman's age is a critical factor. By age 26, a woman's rate of infertility doubles from one in 10 to one in five. By her mid-30s, a woman has a 15 per cent of becoming pregnant each month. By her early 40s, it falls to 5 per cent. Add in miscarriage rates of 25 per cent for women aged 35 to 39, and 50 per cent for women aged 40 to 44, and the rate of chromosomal abnormalities, which increases from a risk of one in 600 for a 20-year-old woman to one in 39 for a 42-year-old woman, and one realises that female fertility is not a given.

Of course, with male infertility accounting for 40 per cent of cases, there is a need for both sexes to understand fertility. Unfortunately, there is a profound gap between perception and reality. A study by the Fertility Society of Australia in 2006 found that 57 per cent of women in their 30s and 43 per cent of women in their 40s believed they would be able to conceive without any problems. The survey of 1200 women and 1200 men found that 40 per cent of childless men and women in their 30s were still saying they were not ready to have a child. While choosing to marry later and have babies even later may fit the career choices of young men and women, the report concluded that "a real tragedy could occur if these people reach their late 30s and decide they have changed their minds and do want children, only to find that it is biologically too late for them".

The FSA recommended an education program informing young people about their fertility. Last week, a similar plea was made in Britain by new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority head Lisa Jardine.

It is a message echoed by Candice Reed and Rebecca Featherstone, two young women who call themselves "IVF-lings". Reed, a journalist in New Zealand, was Australia's first IVF baby, born in 1980. Featherstone, a Sydney agent for media personalities, was conceived in Bourne Hall, Cambridge, where Louise Brown, the world's first IVF baby, was born. In the next few weeks, Reed and Featherstone will be sending letters to state education and health ministers across Australia asking that schoolchildren be taught about fertility and IVF.

Featherstone told The Australian students were not receiving enough information. "The only things I was taught at school were about sexual education, condoms and STDs, that sort of stuff. I never learned anything about infertility or how many people go through IVF. I was never taught how a woman's fertility decreases."

Ask a schoolteacher. Nothing has changed.

Featherstone says it's critical that young girls learn about their biology. "They may hold off having babies and do the career thing. And then they're like: 'Oh no, I'm 35 and I'll have to do IVF.' She says IVF shouldn't be treated lightly as a fallback position for the next generation of career women. "It's not something nice to go through."

With studies showing that mothers in their late 30s and 40s who have baby girls are perhaps compromising their daughters' ability to have children, the trickle-down consequences of infertility will be profound and many of them yet unknown. One thing is clear. For all of feminism's focus on women's choices, its failure to treat motherhood as a legitimate choice did women no favours.

IVF Success Rates ‘Too Low', Fertility Expert

Infertility in Canada: An Issue for the Young Too

Fertility: The Lessons That Come Too Late

The Pain of Miscarriage

When is it too Old to be a Mother?

New Pill to Boost Male Fertility

IVF Used as Fertility Safety Net

Fertility Education Call for Young Children

Monday 2 June, 2008 

Children should be taught in school about infertility as well as about avoiding pregnancy, according to the new head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in Britain.

Lisa Jardine believes too few young people realize the difficulties they could face in trying for a family later in life. She also wants to youngsters to understand how obesity can impact on their future fertility.

"You've got to start it at school. If one in seven of us in the modern world is going to have problems with infertility then instead of all the teaching at school being about how to stop getting pregnant someone had better start teaching about how you do get pregnant, because there are going to be a lot of extremely disappointed people out there."

She adds: "I think male fertility is way down. There are probably all sorts of ecological and environmental reasons why we are less fertile. I think we could take that opportunity to talk about what happens if it isn't easy. In other words, it would make it less of a dreadful threat if you did not get pregnant."

Recent figures from the HFEA show that more than 32,000 women a year get fertility treatment, leading to more than 11,000 births. Studies have shown that female obesity dramatically lowers the chance of conceiving and raises the risk of serious complications during pregnancy.

The British Fertility Society issued guidelines to IVF clinics last year advising starting treatment on severely overweight women only once those women had cut their body mass index to below 35. Women under 37 years should cut their weight further, to a BMI of less than 30, the guidelines stated. A woman with a BMI above 35 was half as likely to get pregnant as a woman whose BMI was less than 30.

Some experts believe obesity could be a factor that will drive one in five couples to seek fertility treatment within a decade.

Jardine wants more widespread knowledge about fertility treatment. She said clinicians can be surprised to find women are unaware of what IVF entails. Yet treated women will probably not be able to work and need daily injections. "They will be given chemicals that disturb their hormonal balance, possibly permanently … they have scans that are intrusive and surgical procedures that are thoroughly invasive, and, at the end, if lucky, get a baby."

Jardine believes there should be more open discussion also on scientific research involving embryos.

May 2008 

Doctors Refuse Fertility Treatment to Same-Sex Couple 

Wednesday 28 May, 2008

Can fertility doctors deny IVF to lesbian couples based on their religious beliefs opposed gay relationships?

That's the question the California Supreme Court is having to grapple with after a same-sex couple sued two doctors who refused to provide them with infertility treatment in 1999. The fertility doctors argue they have the constitutional right to refuse treatment because of their religious beliefs. Their legal argument pits religious freedom against state and federal constitutional laws banning discrimination.

The case comes only two weeks after the state ruled the ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional. And with the Supreme Court being mostly reluctant to hand down rulings which go against the tough civil rights laws for physicians who selectively deny treatment based on sexual orientation, there's a strong chance it will rule in favour of the plaintiff, Guadalupe Benitez. She was denied artificial insemination at the only clinic in her hometown of Oceanside that provided fertility treatment under her insurance plan. At the time, the doctors objected to providing the treatment because of her relationship with her same-sex domestic partner, but did refer her to practitioners at another clinic.

Lawyers for the doctors, along with conservative groups, argue that the Court would set a bad precedent for the medical profession if doctors are forced to provide treatment despite moral and religious objections. They argue that it would trample on religious freedom.

After the hearing Ms Benitez, who has since had twin daughters and a son through IVF told reporters she is pressing the case to prevent others from being humiliated if they end up in a similar position.

The California Medical Association has not taken a position in the Supreme Court.

The court has 90 days to rule.

Jodi Panayotov

Men's Fertility Counts Too!

Tuesday 27 May, 2008

When women prepare themselves to have children, they often start taking prenatal vitamins in order to boost levels of must needed calcium and iron which are essential to a healthy pregnancy.

As for men, it's a different story altogether. The vast majority simply don't follow any pre-conception diet. Not that it's there fault. The fact is that the medical establishment focuses almost solely on women with no emphasis whatsoever on helping prospective fathers have healthy children. And given that men make up half of the child's genes and their sperm is particularly vulnerable to toxins (see latest news item ‘Painters at Risk of Fertility Problems'), this oversight is truly astonishing!

And it's not like the issue is never talked about: the American Association for the Advancement of Science dedicated an entire symposium to the topic earlier this year, with numerous studies coming out since linking men's diets to sperm defects.

But for some reason this information isn't getting through. Some will argue that it's the result of men's cultural reluctance to talk about their sperm because it goes to the core of male virility.

Well if that's the case, it might be time for men to consider changing their mindset. Sperm develop over 10 week period during which men can enhance or at least protect the health of their sperm before they conceive. But the very nature of how sperm is produced means that men should prepare themselves well before that. Indeed, by opposition to women, who are born with a finite number of eggs, men's genes are constantly dividing into new sperm making them particularly vulnerable to DNA flaws.

So for those men willing to listen to pre-conception advice, doctors would tell them to avoid heavy alcohol consumption, illicit drugs, give up cigarettes and start taking vitamins.

This also means that if couples are having trouble conceiving, they should both get thoroughly checked by a qualified medical practitioner.

Jodi Panayotov

Painters at Risk of Fertility Problems

Saturday 25 May, 2008

Source: Journal Occupational Environmental Medicine.