A study of more than 9,000 men with fertility problems links poor semen quality to a higher chance of having hypertension and other health conditions. The findings suggest that more-comprehensive examinations of men undergoing treatment for infertility would be a smart idea.
About a quarter of the adults in the United States (and in the entire world) have hypertension, or high blood pressure. Although it's the most important preventable risk factor for premature death worldwide, hypertension often goes undiagnosed.
In a study published today in Fertility and Sterility, Stanford urologist Mike Eisenberg, MD, PhD, and his colleagues analyzed the medical records of 9,387 men, mostly between 30 and 50 years old, who had provided semen samples in the course of being evaluated at Stanford to determine the cause of their infertility. The researchers found a substantial link between poor semen quality and specific diseases of the circulatory system, notably hypertension, vascular disease and heart disease.
"To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a study showing this association before," Eisenberg told me when I interviewed him for a press release about the findings. "There are a lot of men who have hypertension, so understanding that correlation is of huge interest to us."
In the past few years, Eisenberg has used similar big data techniques to discover links between male infertility and cancer and heightened overall mortality, as well as between childlessness and death rates in married heterosexual men.
Eisenberg sums it all up and proposes a way forward in the release:
Infertility is a warning: Problems with reproduction may mean problems with overall health ... That visit to a fertility clinic represents a big opportunity to improve their treatment for other conditions, which we now suspect could actually help resolve the infertility they came in for in the first place.
Previously: Poor semen quality linked to heightened mortality rate in men, Men with kids are at lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than their childless counterparts and Low sperm count can mean increased cancer risk
Photo by Grace Hebert
