Poor semen quality in men after severe corona infection: publication "to be interpreted with caution"

A new study aims to show that severe corona infections have a negative impact on male fertility.

But on closer inspection, doubts arise.

• There are rumors that corona vaccinations can make you sterile.

  "This is all nonsense", the President of the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), Klaus Cichutek, is quoted by the editorial network Germany: "There is no evidence that there will be problems with fertility".

• A new study of 84 men suffering from corona has now shown that the infection itself can affect the quality of male sperm.

• But medical professionals advise to critically examine the conclusions of the study director.

The corona pandemic brings with it a whole series of worries and uncertainties.

This also includes concerns about how a corona infection could affect fertility.

In order to collect data on this still largely unexplored topic, researchers have now analyzed the sperm quality of a total of 189 men.

Information about 105 healthy study participants was compared with the data from 84 corona-positive men *.

For a total of 60 days, the sperm quality of the men was checked at 10-day intervals

, as reported by the US television channel CNN.

And the researchers actually found differences.

In the Covid patients, increased inflammation levels and more oxidative stress in the semen were detected: "These effects on the sperm are associated with a lower sperm quality and reduced fertility potential. Although these effects tended to improve over time, they remained with the Covid- 19 patients were significantly and abnormally increased, and the extent of these changes was also related to the severity of the disease, "CNN quoted lead researcher Behzad Hajizadeh Maleki, a doctoral student at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen in Hesse.

The more severe the disease, the more negative it was on male fertility, according to the study.

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The virus also had a negative impact on the concentration, mobility and shape of the sperm, they say.

However, the study by the German scientists, which was published in the journal Reproduction, calls in experts who question the results.

"I must exercise great caution in interpreting these data. For example, the authors state that their data show that 'Covid-19 infection causes significant impairment of male reproductive function' when they actually show only one association CNN quotes Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, UK.

According to him, the reduced sperm quality could also be due to obesity - the men

suffering from

Covid were more often too heavy than the men in the control group

, as reported by RTL.de, among others.

Dr.

Channa Jayasena, a specialist in reproductive endocrinology and andrology at Imperial College London, has concerns: "When you get a virus like the flu, your sperm count can temporarily drop (sometimes to zero) for a few weeks or months. This makes it difficult to find out to what extent the reduction observed in this study is specific to Covid-19 ".

Fever, for example, is a factor that can temporarily negatively affect sperm quality

, as the specialist portal Springer Link informs.

Alison Campbell of the CARE fertility clinics in Great Britain advises RTL: "Men should not be overly alarmed".

So far, there is no evidence that Covid-19 permanently damages the sperm.

Campbell also questions the reliability of the study results.

In contrast to the control group, the Covid patients would have been treated with corticoids and antiviral drugs, which could distort the study results

.

(jg) * Merkur.de is part of the Germany-wide Ippen digital editorial network

.

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