Demographic and Social Traits of Infertile Men Visiting the Urology Clinic in South of Iran
Author(s): Shiva Kesbat, Bahram Nateghi, Arman Ahmadishouli, Maryam Badakhshan, Hosein Hamadiyan
Abstract
Infertile couples are those who have not managed to conceive after a year of regular and unprotected intercourse. 25-50% of the infertility cases are due to the male factor. Since a number of individual traits are correctible, raising awareness of those traits can cut down on the rate of infertility. Therefore, the present research aims to investigate the correlation of some individual traits and the parameters related to male infertility. The target population of the present analytic, cross-sectional research was all men visiting the Urology clinic of Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences between January-July 2017. From among 127 visitors of the clinic, 101 entered the study. Once their infertility was established, their demographic information was filled in a checklist of personal information as well as the seminal fluid test results. The data entered SPSS ver. 16.0 and were analyzed using the Chi-squared test, Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman correlation coefficient. P value was set at below 0.05 for the significance of the data. The mean age of the subjects was 29.63±6.28 years. The mean BMI was 25.06±3.54 of the subjects (53.5%) were smokers. 15 of them (14.9%) were diabetic. Most of the infertility problem was due to the lack of sperm motility. 82 subjects (81.2%) had sperm motility below 60% and had fewer than 20 million sperms per milliliter of semen. 3 of them (2.97%) had no sperm at all. In terms of sperm count, the subjects were divided in two groups which were significantly divergent in terms of the state of their diabetes. Diabetes seems to be a risk factor of low sperm count (P=0.042, OR=3.1, CI95%=1.007-9.591). The subjects’ infertility was mostly due to low sperm motility. However, how this parameter was related to the demographic traits was not straightforward. The significant correlation between diabetes and sperm count is a key side effect of diabetes.
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