Researchers find no evidence that sperm counts are dropping | Hacker News Reader

Researchers find no evidence that sperm counts are dropping

medicalxpress.com

33 pointsgeox14 comments

This is a bad title. The proper title should be the exact words of the scientists:

"in this population of sperm donor applicants, in these four Danish cities, sperm concentrations have not changed between 2017 and 2022."

Also, the paper finds that motile "healthy" sperm ACTUALLY WENT DOWN. "However, both the concentration and total numbers of motile (swimming) sperm provided for testing had declined by 16% and 22% respectively from 2019 to 2022."

Either way, this paper is just one against the hundreds of papers and studies of sperm count, from different areas, times, populations, and many show reduced numbers while many do not.

Of course I hope that there's nothing to worry about, but I think the default assumption should be take it very seriously (particularly when microplastics can even be found in men's testicles now).

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Here's a link to the original paper https://academic.oup.com/humrep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

I do not see how falling sperm counts would be a problem.

We spend a lot more time trying not to make babies than we spend worrying that we can not make enough babies.

The married couples who want children could keep trying for a few years. Given today's small families, I don't think waiting would cause much of a problem.

If sperm counts do drop to the point some men are sterile, wouldn't that be cured by natural selection where only the fertile men breed?

If it is environmental in cause not really. Sterility with an outside cause isn't selected for any more than the Somme was capable of selecting for men who are immune to bullets, artillery shells, and bayonets.

It'd be nice if it was that easy. One thing to think about is that I think the scientific understanding is that unhealthy sperm = unhealthy babies. That's the reason sperm have to undergo such a long and grueling race, as a selection process to reduce the odds an inferior spermazoa can impregnate the egg.

Don't they carry the same DNA?

No. But even if they did, having the same DNA isn't enough to have the same impact. See for example prions; same protein, but a different configuration results in a wildly different result.

This view -- to put it bluntly -- is ignorant.

Sometimes people want small families, and sometimes they don't.

Sometimes low sperm count means waiting a few years, and sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes couples have a few years of fertility window, and sometimes they don't.

And this is ignoring any other possible health issues for which infertility is only one symptom.

Females with early menopause die earlier, I‘d not be so sure that involuntary sterility is automatically harmless.

Article after article about dropping sperm counts and now it turns out it wasn’t actually happening.

Makes you pause and wonder what else they’ve been reporting that will turn out to not be true?

This is a short-term study covering a couple cites in Denmark. Maybe representative, maybe not, and it doesn’t establish long-term trends.

I feel this isn’t the right point to take pause about “them”.

Sperm count might not be dropping but the behavioral sink we are in definitely causes men to have a reduced sex drive.

How is that operationalized?

I have no clue what your comment and the parent comment are saying

Operationalization is the process of defining a measurement of a phenomenon.

It's often talked about in reference to measuring intangibles, but it also applies to other measurements. Temperature, for example is operationalized by setting the marks on a thermometer and using them to gauge the temperature of an object. Additionally, measuring the infrared radiation and inferring the temperature by way of the Stefan–Boltzmann law as a infrared thermometer does.

Notably, these aren't measuring the velocities of particles constituting an object and averaging their magnitudes which is the formal definition of temperature.

Likewise, the measurement of sex drive must be defined in order to take such measurements. Often, zero care is taken to the conscious decision to operationalize measuring mental states which is a terrible way to do science - may as well use dowsing rods. Or in other words, how can we be sure the thing we think we're measuring is what we're actually measuring?

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