Many studies have pointed out that Wuhan pneumonia (novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19) may damage male sperm quality and reduce fertility, and now the latest study found that even after recovering from the disease, they may still face the risk of reduced sperm count or even zero.
A team of researchers from the University of Florence, Italy, published a study in Human Reproduction in which they analyzed semen samples from 43 men between the ages of 30 and 65 who had suffered from Wuhan pneumonia, and they found that one month after recovery Twenty-five percent of the men had low sperm counts and nearly 20 percent had azoospermia, the complete absence of sperm in semen, which is much higher than the global rate of about 1 percent of men with azoospermia.
The researchers stress that their study does not prove that Wuhan pneumonia is harmful to sperm; the researchers do not know what the sperm counts of these men were before the infection, so they cannot say with certainty that sperm counts will decline after the diagnosis, but the men who developed azoospermia had previously had children, which means they had valid sperm in the past.
Nangia, a professor of urology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, said that based on the current study and other previous reports, Wuhan pneumonia appears to have at least a temporary effect on the testes and sperm, although he stressed, “The big question is whether a man’s sperm count will recover over Time, and is this a permanent irreversible effect (meaning a decrease in sperm)? Is this a permanent irreversible effect? We still need to launch a more in-depth study to explore.”
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