🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: There's a lot the 'sperm crisis' can tell us about men’s reproductive health.
May 1, 2021 5:00 PMIn 2017, something fairly unprecedented happened in regards to male reproductive health: People actually started talking about it.claiming that men’s sperm counts were just half of what they once had been.The study was a meta-review of research looking at sperm counts over the past four decades, and it included 185 studies that encompassed more than 40,000 men. Between 1973 and 2011, the paper’s authors concluded, the men’s sperm counts fell by more than 50 percent.
The paper kicked off a frenzy of media coverage on the so-called “sperm crisis,” with journalists asking whether we might someday soon find ourselves interritory. The 2006 sci-fi thriller depicts a world where human reproduction has ceased entirely, with apocalyptic results. On the surface, the parallels seemed apt, if not entirely justified. But the specter of a sperm crisis is certainly worrying. If the crisis is as dire as the 2017 paper suggests, we might hit a point where reproduction becomes difficult and then stops altogether. No babies, and soon there’d be no humans at all.found a similarly steep decline in sperm counts. That paper was met with heavy criticism based on critiques of the data included in the analysis.
Much of the criticism centers on the fact that there simply isn’t a reliable trove of data covering the past 40 years to draw from. Laboratory techniques have changed in the decades since sperm data has begun to be collected, and it’s resulted in datasets that don’t always line up. Though the study’s authors made a concerted effort to use quality data, it may not have been enough.
If we look to studies of male fertility, rather than sperm counts, the data appears more mixed. A 2010in the U.K., for example, found no evidence that infertility had increased overall. And even though some studies do indicate that infertility might be increasing, there could be other explanations. What seems like a rise in infertility may actually just be a result of couples choosing to have children later in life, when fertility is naturally lower. That holds for men just as much as for women.
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