The book The Children of Men, set in England a decade hence, portrays a Great Britain in which the male sperm count has dropped to zero.
It would be easy to dismiss the book as yet another dystopian novel, but it may contain a kernel of truth. That’s because the just-published results of perhaps the largest assessment yet confirm that male sperm counts do appear to be steadily declining.
The paper (see .pdf in Human Reproduction) report on a study of more than 26,000 Frenchmen that found a significant and continuous 32.2 percent decrease in semen concentration over a 17-year period, at a rate of about 1.9 percent a year.
Now I know what some of you are thinking — a world with fewer Frenchmen in it is not such a bad thing.
Lover of croissants that I am, I’m not sure I agree with that, but it’s a fair assumption that the finding holds not just for Frenchmen, but for a lot of other men around the world.
The study comes after a recent assessment of sperm counts in men, looking at a broad array of studies, concluded that more and better data were needed to draw definitive conclusions. The study of Frenchmen comes pretty close to satisfying this. The decline does indeed appear to be real and quite significant.
But there is no definitive answer yet.
What constitutes a low sperm count? According to the Mayo Clinic, a sperm count is considered lower than normal if you have fewer than 15 million sperm per milliliter of semen. Having a low sperm count decreases the odds that one of your sperm will fertilize your partner’s egg, but men with a low sperm count can still conceive.
It only takes one, after all.