Male Infertility Linked to Higher Death Risk: Men with Sperm Abnormalities May Die Sooner

It turns out that men who are infertile may be at an increased risk of dying sooner. Scientists have found that those who have two or more abnormalities in their semen are more than twice as likely to die over a roughly eight-year period as men who have normal semen.

Infertility is a widespread medical complaint. Yet while many suffer from this issue, there have been very few studies conducted on male infertility. That's why scientists decided to take a closer look.

The researchers examined records of men between the ages of 20 and 50 who had visited centers to be evaluated for possible infertility. In all, about 12,000 men fitting this description visited the centers between 1994 and 2011. The scientists then monitored these men's mortality for about eight years.

"We were able to determine with better than 90 percent accuracy who died during that follow-up time," said Michael Eisenberg, one of the researchers, in a news release. "There was an inverse relationship. In the years following their evaluation, men with poor semen quality had more than double the mortality rate of those who didn't."

That said, no single semen abnormality in itself predicted mortality. Instead, the researchers found that the number of abnormalities could heighten the risk of death.

"It's plausible that, even though we didn't detect it, infertility may be caused by pre-existing general health problems," said Eisenberg in a news release. "But we controlled for this factor as best we could, and while that did attenuate the measured risk somewhat, there seems to be something else going on. Could it be genetic, developmental or hormonal factors? Or could it be that something about the experience of having and raising kids-even though you may sometimes feel like they're killing you-actually lowers mortality?"

The findings are published in the journal Human Reproduction.