An irreversible problem for the human species that is becoming real. And this problem is male infertility.
Male infertility: what’s going on
The alarm is sounded by the Italian Society of Andrology (SIA), according to which in 2070 the possibility for men to father children could collapse, if lifestyles and environmental conditions are not changed, but also the behaviors logically linked to a drop in fertility rates, such as sexual abstinence, increasingly common among young people and the increase in the age of conception (all Italy has the primacy of the European country where the first child occurs later: on average 35 years for women and 40 for men).
The problem does not only concern the more developed countries, but increasingly also the South of the world. «In just 40 years – he declares Alexander Palmieri, Sia president and Associate Professor of Urology at the Federico II University of Naples – Western men saw their sperm concentration drop by 52.4%. A trend that is experiencing an unstoppable descent that is even more worrying due to the steep decline between 2000 and 2018, attested by the meta-analysis published last November in Human Reproduction Update.
“Very serious dangers for procreation”
«If in fact from 1973 to 2000 the drop in sperm concentration was 1.6% every year, from 2000 to 2018 the reduction more than doubled, equal to 2.64% per year – underlines Palmieri -. If the trend will continue and will not be stopped, by 2070 more than 40% of male fertility will be lost with very serious dangers for procreation in Western countriesif we don’t change the environment around us, the chemicals we are exposed to and the way we live».
The case of Italy is emblematic where in 2022 just over 392,000 children were born. «If you have fewer children, economic and social hardship is undoubtedly to blame, but male fertility is above all in the dock. Obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, the habit of smoking and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases are in fact among the main causes suspected of having determined the drop in sperm counts, to which climate change and environmental pollution must be added.»Palmieri underlines.