Infertility: Ultrasound makes lame sperm quick

2024-02-17 05:58:42

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Ultrasound makes lame sperm quick

Status: 17.02.2024 | Reading time: 2 minutes

The end of inertia: A new method aims to get immobile sperm moving again

Quelle: Getty Images/Toshiro Shimada

If sperm are too slow, it is difficult to conceive children naturally. A new therapy idea is now coming from Australia: Researchers there have bombarded male sperm cells with ultrasound – thereby turning them into super swimmers.

When sperm come outside, they move quite quickly: the flagellated cells can travel seventeen kilometers per hour. Actually. But there are also men who are infertile because their sperm crawl rather than rush. Because the female cervix is constructed like thisthat it only allows fast – vital – swimmers to reach the egg cell.

When sperm are slow, doctors speak of asthenozoospermia. If the men concerned still want to have children, then up until now this has been called: artificial insemination. There are also medications that make slow sperm cells faster. However, they change the genetic makeup of the sperm and ultimately harm the children that are born from them.

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Researchers led by engineer Ali Vafaie from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have now come up with another trick. In the specialist magazine „Science Advances“ they report a possible “mechanotherapy” for infertile men. If you bombard their testicles with ultrasound waves of 40 megahertz, it could give lame sperm a leg up, so to speak.

At least that’s what they believe after observing what happens to ejaculate from humans and cattle in a laboratory dish during this treatment: the irradiated sperm swam two and a half times faster. Even completely immobile sperm began to flail and dart around again. In the study, 34 percent of the living, immobile sperm became agile again as a result of the radiation.

The researchers are now proposing to initially use the procedure in assisted reproduction, in which eggs are fertilized in the laboratory. If sperm donations were pre-treated with ultrasound, the chances of successful fertilization would be better. Above all, they hope that this will make the procedure more affordable: Because it would be simpler, it would be much cheaper than the established methods in which the sperm is introduced into the egg using a pipette, manual work on a micrometer scale.

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The scientists also present an explanation for the observed effect: They believe that the sound treatment wakes up the cells’ power plants, the mitochondria. Mitochondria gain energy by passing electrons between certain molecules. Environmental toxins, autoimmune reactions and other stress factors are said to damage these electron cascades. And supposedly the ultrasound can restart these processes if they have stalled.