HAPPY+HEALTHY Your health
It’s not you, it’s him
JONATHAN WALDMAN, THEN 29, and his wife, then 26, had been trying to conceive a baby for nine months before they finally got pregnant. Sadly, that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. A few weeks later, the Winnipeg couple decided to visit a fertility clinic, where the doctor ordered a semen analysis for Waldman. The verdict: Waldman’s sperm had motility issues, which means they weren’t moving or swimming efficiently. (Motility is more than just the speed of the sperm—it has to do with how the sperm move, which can be a straight line, small circles, or in a zigzag.) “Thankfully, the motility wasn’t disastrously low and there weren’t any issues with morphology—the size and shape of the sperm—or my sperm counts,” says Waldman, whose book, Swimming Aimlessly: One Man’s Journey through Infertility and What We Can All Learn from It, comes out in March. Still, the doctor said there were some things Waldman could try. He started exercising more, ate healthier, and under the advice of his wife’s acupuncturist, he snacked on goji berries, which contain antioxidants used in traditional Chinese medicine to improve fertility. On a follow-up test three months later, his sperm motility had improved. One in six couples in Canada is infertile—defined as being unable to conceive a baby naturally after a year of trying—and difficulties with the male’s ability to produce healthy sperm, or the sperm’s inability to get where it needs to go, play a role somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the time. Even so, women often bear the brunt of the solution. That’s because in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process of joining a sperm and an egg outside of the body and then implanting it in the uterus, has a high success rate and can be accomplished even when there are issues with the sperm. While there are some ways to improve a man’s fertility, experts say more research is needed. Meanwhile, men who experience infertility say they are lacking resources and a support network.
In some cases, this is because of a condition called varicoceles (pronounced VAR-uh-ko-seels), which are swollen veins in the scrotum. “These dilated veins expose the testicles to a lot of heat and they can impair the sperm count, the concentration of the sperm, the movement of the sperm and the quality of the sperm,” explains Premal Patel, a urologist with a focus on male fertility, based in Winnipeg. Other times it’s lifestyle: Alcohol consumption, cannabis use, being a smoker and being overweight can all decrease sperm production and impact sperm health. Congenital conditions or previous infections, like sexually transmitted infections or mumps, can also lead to infertility because inflammation in the testicles can cause blockages and damage. Low testosterone can negatively affect fertility, but don’t take a testosterone supplement to improve it—that will shut off the body’s mechanism for producing sperm. Being older can also make it harder for you to conceive, but the drop in fertility isn’t as quick and sudden in men as it is in women. That said, it’s both partners’ fertility combined that determines the final outcome. “Let’s say there are some issues with the sperm, such that it’s not impossible to get pregnant, but it’s not optimal,” explains Jason Hitkari, a reproductive endocrinologist, founder of Olive Fertility Centre in Vancouver, and president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. “Then you add in an older female partner, and that’s going to lower their chances.” For Vince Londini, a 49-year-old dad in London, Ont., the problem wasn’t his sperm’s health or a blockage—it was that he had no sperm in his semen at all. “It was stunning,” says Londini, recalling the moment he found out, at only age 29. “My whole conception of being a father, being a husband to my wife—all this stuff just blew up in my face. There was nothing to work with.”
Testing and treating The causes of male infertility When the male partner contributes to infertility, Keith Jarvi, a urologist and male infertility expert at Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto, says there’s either “something that affects sperm production or something that blocks the sperm from coming out.”
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todaysparent.com January+February 2021
Generally, if you’ve been trying to get pregnant for 12 months without success, a doctor will recommend a semen analysis as a first step in determining what the issue might be. (If a woman is older, testing is often started sooner.) “The investigation for the woman is often a lot harder to do because it’s things like having
PHOTO: CARMEN CHEUNG SET DESIGN: CAITLIN DOHERTY
For up to half of the Canadian couples who experience infertility, difficulties conceiving are due to an issue with the male partner’s reproductive system. But we don’t talk about how common this is—and there hasn’t been enough research.
