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New hope for male fertility
Categories: Health & Safety, Medical Conditions
For infertile men and their partners, a new technique discovered by German doctors could be an enormous breakthrough.
The procedure treats Varicoceles, a relatively common affliction caused by circulation problems, that some doctors feel is a leading cause of infertility. While often harmless, this can cause the scrotum temperature to rise, thus reducing sperm count. With a minimally invasive procedure, doctors can now correct this condition.
However, there's conflicting views within the medical community as to whether or not Varicoceles actually causes infertility in the first place. Other doctors believe that varicose veins in the testicle, and not Varicoceles, is the primary cause of male infertility. If they're right, the new procedure to fix the condition looks pretty worthless.
At the moment, it looks like the data doesn't fully support either theory.
Have your plans for starting a family been affected by infertility? How did you work through it?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
creative-type dad 11-30-2006 @ 1:52PM
Yikes! All of this sure takes the fun out of making a baby.
I've never had this problem, but if we did. We would have just adopted.
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DaniGirl 12-01-2006 @ 2:06PM
After more than a year of trying to conceive, my husband was diagnosed with severe male factor infertility. Less than 3% normal morphology and diminished motility and counts. We had two unsuccessful IUIs, and then conceived our first son via IVF.
When I was 6 months pregnant, he had varicocele repair surgery. They wouldn't do the surgery in lieu of the fertility treatments because it wasn't a proven technique to improve fertility, but did the surgery in the end because he was having debilitating pain in his bits.
He had the surgery in December of 2001. In May of 2003, we conceived our second son naturally. In August of 2006, we conceived our third child naturally, a child we lost to miscarriage just last week at 16 wks.
So yes, I think the varicocele repair surgery made all the difference in the world in our circumstance. While I can't help but wonder if this procedure, fully covered by Canadian socialized medicine, done earlier would have prevented our need to spend thousands on IVF, I can't question any action that led to my two wonderful boys.
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