Israel: A significant new study has found that the global sperm count of men is declining quickly after having decreased by half over the previous 40 years. The report has urged intervention to halt the loss.

Israeli epidemiologist Mr. Hagai Levine’s study, which was published in 2017, updates earlier research that had drawn criticism for only considering regions of North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The new study is the largest meta-analysis on the topic, containing information from more than 57,000 males gathered from 223 studies in 53 nations.

The study corroborated the 2017 result that sperm counts have decreased by half over the past forty years with the addition of the new countries. The latest study discovered that between 1973 and 2018, the quantity of sperm in men who were not known to be infertile decreased by more than 51 percent, from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per millimetre of semen.

Furthermore, the pace of loss appears to be accelerating, the researchers discovered that sperm concentrations decreased by 1.16 percent annually after reviewing data gathered on all continents since 1972. But when they just included information gathered since 2000, the reduction was 2.64 percent each year.

While the study took into consideration variables including age and the length of time between ejaculations, and eliminated men who were known to be infertile, it has limitations, notably the fact that it did not examine additional measures of sperm quality.

While the cause of the apparent trend is unknown, one theory is that endocrine-disrupting substances or other environmental variables may be at play and affect the foetus while it is still in the womb. According to experts, variables like smoking, drinking, being overweight, and eating poorly may also be involved, and leading a healthy lifestyle may aid to increase sperm counts.

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