"They Just Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To!"
 The world's first study looking at the fertility of children born after their mothers received fertility treatment two decades ago has found their sperm concentration was 46 per cent lower, and sperm counts 45 per cent lower than in other men.
Nearly 2000 Danish men volunteered to be examined as part of the research. In addition to having lower sperm counts, the 47 men whose mothers said they had conceived following fertility treatment were also found to have smaller testes, fewer sperm that "swam" as they are supposed to, and more sperm cell deformities compared with the other men.
"Of Course It's Safe!"The effect was more exaggerated in the 25 mothers who identified their form of fertility treatment as hormonal therapy - most likely to have been anti-oestrogen drugs to stimulate follicle growth and ovulation.
The research, published earlier this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, has become possible as the first generation of children born thanks to assisted reproduction techniques enter young adulthood and become sexually mature. Sperm concentration was a median of 48 million per millilitre in the natural-born men, compared with 33 million in the men whose mothers had had fertility treatment, before statistical adjustments. The World Health Organisation defines the lower threshold of normal as 20 million sperm per millilitre. Thirty per cent of the fertility-treatment men were below this threshold, compared with 20 per cent of the normal-birth men. "The worry has always been that by bypassing biology, gametes (sperm and egg cells) are participating in conception in vitro that (they) would never have participated (in) in real life," Professor Aitken said. There goes the neighborhood...literally!
Paul Ellis - Men's Health 
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