Men With Reduced Fertility At Reduced Risk For Prostate CancerInvoluntary childlessness owing to reduced fertility is a concern for many men. However, these men do have one advantage - they run a significantly lower risk of suffering from prostate cancer. Researchers are interested in whether this phenomenon could be used in the fight against cancer. There is a clear link between male subfertility and a lower risk of prostate cancer...
Ultrasound Male Contraceptive, Overlooked For Decades, Confirmed To Work Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists' offices around the world. Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr...
Removal And Storage Of Ovarian Tissue Enables Birth After Cancer TreatmentFor the first time in Germany, a woman has given birth to a child after removal and preservation of tissue from one of her ovaries. This course of action was necessary to avoid infertility owing to chemo- and radiotherapy. Andreas Müller and his colleagues report the case in the current issue of Deutsches Arzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109[1-2]: 8-13)...
Dietary DHA Linked To Male FertilityWho knew that male fertility depends on sperm-cell architecture? A University of Illinois study reports that a certain omega-3 fatty acid is necessary to construct the arch that turns a round, immature sperm cell into a pointy-headed super swimmer with an extra long tail...
New Practice Model May Reduce Miscarriage After Assisted Reproduction Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services today announced the publication of an article in the December issue of Reproductive BioMedicine Online about miscarriage rates following IVF treatment with frozen thawed embryos which may revolutionize clinical and laboratory practice...
Twin Births Rise Dramatically, Especially For Older Women The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) released a report showing that the rate of twin births has risen quite substantially since the 1980s, especially amongst older women. In 1980, one in every 53 births was a twin birth, while by 2009 the number had risen to one in every 30, or three percent...
Aging Human Bodies And Aging Human Oocytes Run On Different ClocksReproductive and somatic aging use different molecular mechanisms that show little overlap between the types of genes required to keep oocytes healthy and the genes that generally extend life span, according to Coleen Murphy, Ph.D., of Princeton University, who described her new findings on oocyte aging at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in Denver...
Wi-Fi Laptops Harm Sperm Motility And Increase Sperm DNA FragmentationMales who place a laptop on their laps with the WI-FI on might have a greater risk of reduced sperm motility and more sperm DNA fragmentation, which could, in theory, undermine their chances of becoming fathers, researchers from Nascentis Medicina Reproductiva, Argentina, and the Eastern Virginia Medical School, USA, reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility this week...
Teen Births Hit Record Low, C-Sections Down, CDC Reports For 2010 Teen births in the US hit a record low in 2010, and for the first time in a decade, C-sections appear to be falling, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These revelations are in a report released last week titled "Births: Preliminary Data for 2010" from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics...
Improving IVF Success By Increasing Uterine Expression Of Developmental GenesNew research in Developmental Cell suggests that increasing expression of certain developmental genes at precise times in the uterus might improve pregnancy rates from in vitro fertilization-embryo transfers (IVF-ET), which remain low at around 30 percent. Conducted by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the study was published online by the journal on Nov. 17...
When Does Pregnancy Start? Doctors' Opinions VaryDoes pregnancy start at conception - when the sperm fertilizes the egg? Or does it begin one week later when the embryo implants in the uterus? According to a survey carried out by researchers from the University of Chicago and published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, not even doctors appear to agree. Dr. Farr A...