Daily romp holds key to sperm health
If stress, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle are taking the sting out of your sperms, here’s a solution – sex. You heard right! Daily romps can not only keep your tool in good working condition but even improve the quality of your semen, a study has found.
In fact, daily ejaculations improved the fertility quotient of men with damaged sperms over a period of week, the Australian study shows.
Dr David Greening, an expert from Australian fertility clinic Sydney IVF, told 118 male subjects with damaged sperms to ejaculate daily for a period of seven days. The subjects, whose sperm damage was determined to be between 15 to 98 per cent, weren’t asked to alter their lifestyle or diets. Nor were they prescribed any medicines.After the week was over, their sperm count was found to have declined from 180 million to 70 million. However, its quality improved and the number of damaged sperms reduced by 26 per cent.
The researcher also noted that sperm motility, which plays a major role in fertilisation, also increased in the subjects, boosting their chances of impregnating a woman.
Dr Greening said, “We found that although frequent ejaculation decreased semen volume and sperm concentrations, it did not compromise sperm motility and, in fact, this rose slightly but significantly.”
As many as 80 per cent of the subjects saw their sperm quality improve by various degrees, leading the researcher to believe that sperms staying in the testicles too long tend to decline in quality. “Sperms don't seem to like staying in warm testicles for too long. The advice might be to keep the rivers flowing,” Dr Greening said, presenting the findings at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology.
The observations could also explain why older couples have fertility problems. Younger couples tend to have sex more often and the frequency peters out as time passes by. “Perhaps reproductively we are built to do it in our youth. We have been blaming women as we get older when perhaps there is also contribution from the male because we are not behaving as we should be,” Dr Greening said.
Whoever said it’s quality and not quantity that matters in sex sure got it wrong.
