They Say: What’s Going on With the Sons of Infertile Men?
Posted by Madeline Holler at 1:45 PM on September 18, 2008
Just what is the cost to the gene pool with all the medical advances in helping infertile couples to conceive? The answer is: scientists don't actually know.
What they think, however, is that girls will be fine. What's got researchers curious now is the sons of men who had drastically low sperm count.
These boys' conception was made possible by an advancement in fertility treatments that injected a single sperm into the center of an egg. The first generation of the sons are now 15-years-old. The question is, will they have inherited whatever it was that made their fathers have a low sperm count? Will it be worse in kids they manage to conceive?
ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, made it possible for all but sterile men to conceive children of their own over 10 years ago. Now that puberty is kicking in, scientists will be able to see whether their boys inherited the same problems.
One father of a son and a daughter, conceived through ICSI and IVF, said he wasn't worried. He figured there would be equal or better infertility treatments for his son, if needed.
Does this apply to anybody out there? Do you worry about what all this means? They article brings up a very sci-fi scenario, one in which there are no men left who can get a woman pregnant.
Photo: MSNBC.com
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