Spermatozoa don't like smog

Study: due to air pollution, the quality of sperm deteriorates

Lydia Sorokina, XX2 century

Shanghai scientists report that probably polluted air negatively affects the reproductive function of men. The Chinese conducted a large-scale study: they studied sperm samples from 33,876 volunteers from 340 different cities of China and shared the results in the peer-reviewed scientific journal JAMA Network Open (Zhao et al., Association of Exposure to Particulate Matter Air Pollution With Semen Quality Among Men in China).

The average age of the volunteers was 34 years. The wives of all the study participants could not get pregnant on their own and turned to the clinic to conceive a child with the help of assisted reproductive technologies. Scientists collected sperm samples from volunteers and examined them for sperm motility, as well as the number of the latter per unit volume. Then the researchers looked for a pattern between the quality of sperm and air pollution in the region where its owner was for 90 days before ejaculation.

As a result, it turned out that the sperm of the lowest quality was found in men who lived in areas with the highest concentration of small solid particles in the air (solid particles are dust, dirt, smoke, soot, etc.). It is small particles that easily enter the body when breathing that have a particularly negative effect on people's health.

According to the calculations of Chinese researchers, when a man is exposed to inhaled particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers, the quality of his sperm decreases by 3.6%. But particles with a diameter of 10 micrometers worsen the quality of sperm by only 2.44%. At the same time, so far we are talking only about correlation (albeit on an impressive sample), and in order to establish a clear cause-and-effect relationship between sperm quality and air pollution, the authors of the work say, further research is needed.

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