2023-05-11 17:33:35
The fallout emergency is a social but also a biological crisis. Air and electromagnetic pollution, combined with unhealthy lifestyles, are irreparably damaging the genetic heritage of spermatozoa, compromising man’s chances of conception and making him more susceptible to disease. With damage that increases over time. Thus, already from the age of 35 and over, the accumulated damages can prevent conception or increase the probability of passing on to children genetic and epigenetic defects that favor pathologies in childhood, adulthood and even subsequent generations. The picture was drawn by Luigi Montano, uroandrologist of the ASL of Salerno and past president of the Italian Society of Human Reproduction (Siru), on the eve of his speech at the General States of Fertility, tomorrow in Rome.
Considering these data, “advertisements like the one made recently by actor Robert De Niro, who became a father at 79, can be deceptive and misleading,” says Montano. “Today it is simplistic to think that only economic measures can counter the current emergency falling in the birth rate”, he underlines. “Our society is in crisis because it is our biology itself. We have reached a critical point, so much so that in 2070 if the trend of the number and above all of the sperm quality continues to have the dangerous drop detected by various studies, the hypothesis of the extinction of our species due to irreversible male infertility cannot be ruled out at all”.
The causes are many, but the effect is unique: “man becomes progressively unable to conceive, so much so that according to the latest meta-analysis of November 2022 published in the Human Reproduction Update in the last 46 years, from 1973 to 2018, the concentration of globally has more than halved (51.6%), with an acceleration of sperm loss per year doubled from 2000 to 2018 compared to the period 1973 to 2000. What is most worrying is the rapid decline that has occurred and is occurring in countries once considered to have high fertility, such as Africa, Brazil, India, China, all countries that in the last two to three decades have been recording significant rates of environmental pollution and important changes in the lifestyles of the resident population”, reads a note .
Montano, ‘incentives are needed to bring the age of the first child forward, new study on the role of pollution’
“It is evident that with respect to these cumulative factors of reproductive damage, decisive actions are needed in the very short term, based on innovative policies on the educational and health fronts and above all an acceleration towards the eco-conversion of the planet to reduce pollution rates”, he proposes Mountain. On the age front, on the other hand, “for example, a sort of increased bonus, a Superbonus, or in any case much more important incentives and supports than those proposed so far can be envisaged for those who bring even more children into the world (at least 2) in the 18-32 years of age, the best biological reproductive age. In summary, growing support based on the number of children and above all on anticipation of the first child”, says Montano.
The advantage – explains a note – of encouraging the lowering of the age of conception is twofold: on the one hand, couples will have more time to plan a further pregnancy in their best biological age and help accelerate the demographic recovery of the country in which a delay of at least two decades can be discounted, on the other hand it will be possible to prevent all those pathologies that seem to be increasingly associated with the cumulative effects of advanced age with the environmental ones and bad lifestyles which in fact induce premature aging of the gametes with epigenetic and genetic alterations inherited since conception and which result not only in conception difficulties, higher incidence of obstetric and neonatal pathologies, but also increasingly frequent neurodevelopmental pathologies, tumors in childhood, in adulthood and even in subsequent generations.
Meanwhile, researchers’ attention is increasingly focused on determining more precisely and accurately the role of pollution on reproductive health. As part of the EcoFoodFertility research project, coordinated by Montano, evidence was found of the presence of other emerging contaminants in addition to those already described in previous studies in seminal fluid. “In a new study, to be published, we have detected the presence of microplastics in semen. This is further evidence of how deeply we are polluted and how even these emerging contaminants such as plastic residues can threaten the reproductive system. Male infertility is therefore a global emergency that jeopardizes the protection of the human species – concludes Montano – but on which there is not yet full awareness in the political and health fields”.
#Siru #age #sperm #quality #deteriorates #due #smog #lifestyles