A new study finds that the ‘quality’ of a man’s sperm correlates with their longevity.
Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.
Danish scientists analysed samples from nearly 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.
The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers report in Human Reproduction.
“It really seems to be that the better the semen quality, the longer the survival,” said Dr Lærke Priskorn, an epidemiologist at Copenhagen university hospital, who led the study with Dr Niels Jørgensen, an andrologist at the hospital.
This is a major longitudinal study with a large sample of 60,000 people done over 30 years. I hesitate to critique scientific research based on newspaper reports but what one is to do with this information beats me, and the report’s only statement about possible benefits is rather weak.
The researchers now want to find out which diseases are more common in men with poor semen quality. If particular conditions are identified, doctors could ultimately advise men on preventive action should sperm analysis show they are at risk.
You. can read more here.
Women have long complained that much more time and money and effort is spent on research on even relatively minor aspects of men’s health while research on women’s health is underserved. This kind of news will lend support to that belief.
This sounds a lot like conflating correlation with causation.
I’m certain that a longitudinal study of this size was looking at dozens, if not hundreds, of characteristics.
And the odds were probably pretty good that they would find one characteristic, X, which tracked with another, Y.
Even if the characteristics are independent. Even with that many participants in the study.
Show me the causal path which links sperm quality with longevity, either by a direct link or by a common ancestor.
I got my vasectomy at age 22.
Apparently I’ve been dead for decades.
Probably, there is some third variable, such as overall metabolic health.
Men with metabolic health challenges see both poorer lifespan and also poorer sperm quality, while similar women may have more challenges with issues such as PCOS. The observables are all affected by the more hidden factor. There’s no reason to think the observables cause each other.
It’s a correlation…
There are plenty of things you can eat/drink/do/experience/whatever which will both kill your sperm and cut a few years off your life expectancy.
Seems plausible. Although im not sure how useful it would be as a screening test, mostly because men tend to be weird about that sort of stuff
(Puts on juvenile adolescent hat) -- Well the way to improve the quality of sperm is obviously loads(heh heh) of practice and we should get right to that task.
However given that I currently have to practice the most effective form of natural contraception (i.e. children) that joke isnt funny any more.