Men in France may be uniformly producing less sperm than men in other nations says a new study from researchers at the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology in Birmingham, Alabama.
According to the study the sperm count for French men fell roughly 32 percent between 1989 and 2005. For the study they reviewed data collected on over 26,600 French men from 123 sperm clinics around the country. They found that sperm counts fell from roughly 74 million per one milliliter to 50 million.
"That's certainly within the normal range, but if you think about it, if there continues to be a decrease, we would expect that we'll get into that infertile range," says lead researcher Grace Centola.
"One would look at that and say it's not all that much. It isn't, but if it's occurring on a yearly basis it can add up," said Centola. "Clearly if this type of decrease continues, we're going to find that we're going to have young men that have low sperm counts," she said.
The data appears in this month's Human Reproduction journal.
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