An increasing number of couples struggling with infertility find themselves having to seek help with conceiving in order to have the family they dream of having.Â
But now a new study has worryingly suggested that boys born to fathers who needed help conceiving inherited their father’s poor sperm quality.
The study, published in Human Reproduction, looked at men who were conceived using Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), and according to the researchers, the research seemed to confirm their theory that boys would inherit poor fertility from their fathers.
ICSI was developed in the early 1990s to help men with a low sperm count, abnormally shaped sperm or sperm that does not move well, and during the procedure, a single, good quality sperm is selected and injected directly into an egg. Statistics wise, in 2013 in the UK, 37,566 embryos were transferred using ICSI, which was just over half of all IVF treatments performed.
The study was carried out at the Universiteit Brussels – where ICSI was developed – and looked at 54 men aged 18 to 22. They were compared with 57 men of the same age.
What showed up, was that men born from ICSI had almost half the sperm concentration and a two-fold lower total sperm count and motile sperm – that can swim well – than men of a similar age whose parents conceived naturally. As well as this, they were also nearly three times more likely to have sperm concentrations below the World Health Organization’s definition of a “normal” level – 15 million per millilitre of semen – and four times more likely to have total sperm counts below 39 million.
Prof Richard Sharpe, leader of the Male Reproductive Health Research Team at the University of Edinburgh, said that since most cases of male infertility were unexplained, it was uncertain that the father’s fertility problems would be “inherited.”
“Importantly, the results are a reminder to us that ICSI is not a treatment for male infertility,” Sharpe explained to BBC News. “But simply a way of bypassing a problem and leaving it for the next generation to deal with – something my generation seem horribly adept at doing.”
But it is not all bad news, as Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, tells the BBC that he thinks the findings were “reassuring”.
“Twenty years ago we were telling parents that their sons might have the same problems as they did and that they would also need ICSI to reproduce. But this suggests that might not always be the case.”
