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.
Two studies at ASRM 2012 addressed the issues of the effects of an advanced age in the male partner and sperm abnormalities in the male partner on success with IVF using donor eggs.
One used a paired recipient egg donor program to study the effect of male age on outcome and found no difference in pregnancy or live birth rate in men over 40 (n = 395) or over 50 (n = 93) compared to men under age 40 (n = 176). In the past studies have varied in finding or not finding an effect of male age. Populations are likely to vary considerably in lifestyle and nutritional habits, which may underlie these differences.
Another did an analysis of the ICSI fertilization rate of 374 vitrified warmed donor eggs which revealed a lower rate (75 vs 87%, p < 0.001) with male factor compared with normal semen parameters. Fertilization requires an interaction of both sperm and egg factors but when doing this study on donor eggs, that tends to rule out the egg as the cause of the lover fertilization rate.