Fertility FILE

Letting Your Fertility Go Up in Smoke

When you spend money to do infertility treatment, you trade your hard-earned resources to get a boost towards getting pregnant sooner. How would you feel about spending money to LOWER your chances? This is exactly what happens when you or your partner smokes.

I usually start off by telling my smoker patients that cigarette smoke, whether actively inhaled or even breathed passively, can harm the ability to conceive. Consider the fact that the tars, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, fomaldehyde and carbon monoxide found in smoke are toxins that can cause short-term damage to eggs and sperm as well as accelerate the aging process so as to cause long-term damage in females. Toxins are concentrated in the cervical mucus of the female, rendering a hazardous barrier to the sperm as they try and swim past.

Smoking may not just hurt your chance to conceive naturally. It can also lower your odds of success with IUI or IVF, requiring more cycles and more time to achieve the pregnancy you want. Smoking during pregnancy can cause an increase in obstetric complications and even affect the child after birth, including a higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome

BUT, as much as I look negatively on the effects of smoking, I am not in favor of demanding government bans on smoking. I believe in the principle of individual freedom, which includes the rights of smokers to harm their own health as long as the rights of non-smokers are not infringed upon. These include the right not to be exposed to second-hand smoke and the right not to be financially burdened to care for the excess health problems brought on by smoking. In any case, I continue to do my part to offer education to others to help them make their own decisions.

Please remember that the decisions that you make will affect how long it takes before you have a healthy baby.

Fertility FILE 101: SEMEN ANALYSIS

A semen analysis is a test to evaluate the husband's sperm.  It is one of the least expensive, least invasive tests in the standard fertility evaluation. To perform the test, the husband is asked to abstain for at least two days, preferably three, and no more than seven days. He is then instructed to ejaculate into a sterile cup and bring the sample to the office within one hour.

Upon receipt of the sample, the first thing done in the laboratory is to look at it and describe anything unusual about its color or appearance. Next, the sample is measured for its volume. Finally, a drop of it is placed into a special counting chamber, such as the Makler chamber, which is what we use in our office.

By counting how many sperm fall into the squares of a precisely calibrated grid and by distinguishing the moving sperm from the non-moving sperm, a sperm count and motility are calculated.

The basic two features evaluated are the sperm count and the sperm motility. The count refers to how many sperm there and the motility refers to how many of them are moving.

There are also more detailed features that can be determined about the sperm, such as the morphology and the DNA integrity.