Male evaluation
Male infertility evaluation begins with semen analysis, which is performed at the clinic with a turn around of 2 business days for the final report.
Further evaluation, if necessary, can be provided by one of our associated urologists.
If your semen analysis results are abnormal, don't become too worried. Male infertility is one of the areas of great confusion, speculations and anxiety.
Abnormal sperm analysis results usually only indicate a possibility of lower fertility. However, even in the most severe cases of male factor, modern technology has the ability to help.
Remember, we can only say with certainty that men is sterile when no sperm is found in semen analysis.
The World Health Organization guidelines refer to the semen sample as normal if:
- It is at least 2 ml in volume
- At least 50% sperm cells are motile
- At least 40 million sperm cells per ejaculate
- At least 30% of the sperm cells have normal morphology
However, a study of men undergoing vasectomy, who are proven fertile, shows a large variation, well outside normal limits.
One of the highly reputable studies into the subject suggests that anything above 5 million total motile sperm cells in ejaculate does not make any difference for fertility.
Moreover, even sperm count below 1 million motile sperm cells does not preclude pregnancy in some couples.
On the other hand, paradoxically, an apparently normal sperm sample may fail to fertilize an egg during an IVF in about 5% of the cases, motivating some programs to use ICSI irrespective of sperm characteristics to assure fertilization.
Only about 10% of males with infertility are carriers of chromosomal errors. Usually those are cases with severe forms of infertility where no live sperm cells are present in ejaculate.
