January 11, 2019.
What if the quality of sperm was also a determining factor in the success of a pregnancy? Researchers have discovered that the quality of it could be responsible for miscarriages.
Is semen responsible for repeated miscarriages?
When a woman has suffered multiple miscarriages in a row, she often turns to her doctor or specialist to try to find the cause. The female fertility factors are numerous and it is not not always easy to determine the imbalance that prevents pregnancy to be brought to completion.
But this time it is in men, and in particular in their sperm, that the researchers are interested. Their objective ? Try to find a factor on the side of the partners of these women who have suffered three consecutive miscarriages within twenty weeks of pregnancy.
The quality of sperm at stake
Scientists from Imperial College London published the results of their work in the journal Clinical Chemistry. They compared the semen of 50 men whose partners had miscarriages with that of 60 men whose partners had not miscarried. The DNA of the first group is damaged and has four times more reactive oxygen species (ROS) than the sperm of the second group.
” Although this is a small study, it gives us some leads to follow. If we confirm in further work that high levels of reactive oxygen species in semen increase the risk of miscarriage, we could try to develop treatments to reduce them and increase the chances of pregnancy », Concludes Channa Jayasena, in charge of the study.
Maylis Choné
