When faced with male infertility, one in two couples has a chance of having a child. But beware, the age of the father and mother can drop the statistics.
Glass half empty or glass half full? Everyone will judge but, in any case, the figures leave no doubt: a couple facing a male infertility problem has a one in two chance of having a child. This is what a study conducted at the Toulouse Male Sterility Center has just revealed. The news deserves to be underlined because until now, infertility has mainly been studied from a female perspective. The chances of success after ICSI, in vitro fertilization or even artificial insemination have been measured, evaluated and weighed, but most of the time humans were relegated to the background. This study has the merit of changing perspective. And one in two chance of having a child, it is neither more nor less the same result as when the infertility comes from the woman. Moreover, the concerns of sterility are fairly distributed. Of all the couples who come for a consultation to try to have a child, 30% experience male infertility, 30% female infertility, and for the remaining 40%, the problem is twofold.
But the Toulouse research team wanted to know more. And in particular, how did they manage to have a child. For this, 1,200 couples were interviewed four years after being treated at the male sterility center. First information: 16% had reached their goal quite naturally, without any help from science. Almost a third – 32% – owed their completed pregnancy to medically assisted procreation, 8% to medical or surgical treatment and 4% to adoption. Statistical calculations lead researchers to say that the most “realistic” hypothesis is around 48% of chances of having a successful child.
However, this average hides strong disparities. And what makes the chances of becoming parents go up or down is basically the age of the parents at the time of conception.
Marie Walschaerts, epidemiologist in the human fertility research group at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. “Before 35, the chances of having a child are twice as high as after 35”.
Today, the average age of mothers at the birth of their first child is dangerously close to the fateful threshold of 30 years. Yet fertility is at its peak… ten years earlier. As for the age at which a man becomes a father, again the statistics are strangely silent. A French study published in 2008 had already revealed that couples using artificial insemination were three times more likely to end up with a miscarriage when the father is over 40 years old.
Marie Walschaerts: “This should encourage men to regularly consult an andrologist as women do with their gynecologist”.
Today, one in seven couples consult for infertility problems. And according to the latest assessment carried out by the biomedicine agency, one in 40 children today comes from medically assisted procreation.
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