ASRM ABSTRACTS: Male obesity adversly affacts fertility

This is one of a series of news items from abstracts of studies presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine as complied by Dr. David Meldrum, Scientific Director of Reproductive Partners. We appreciate the enormous amount of work it takes to compile and comment on these abstracts.


In a study of men requiring surgical removal of sperm they found that male obesity has a profound negative effect on male fertility,

Seventy men had micro TESE to obtain sperm for IVF with ICSI. In spite of similar sperm retrieval rates with increasing BMI, multivariate logistic regression showed that as male BMI increased, birth rate decreased. No man with BMI over 43 produced a pregnancy.

Obesity is a state of oxidative stress. Men with very high BMI’s are burning 2-3 times as many calories as a man of normal weight just to maintain weight. It is possible that high antioxidant and amega-3 intakes could reverse some of that effect.

For more information, please see our Lifestyle & Fertility pages which has a link to Dr. Meldrum’s lifechoices pages on his website.