Male Health

Follow me on Twitter. Seriously.

It’s been a little over five years. I wrote my first post on this blog, The Mysteries of Funny Looking Sperm, April 18, 2010. At the time, this blog was very much an experiment, and I had no idea how it would work. In my daily life, I see a lot of men with difficulties having children or other male health problems, and they don’t tell you anything about that when you take “sex ed” in high school. Lots of men share the same problems, and I would say the same things to different men throughout the day. So I thought that I would put my end of those conversations in a general way on a blog, so that men around the world with questions about male reproductive health might find some answers.

My first few blog posts came from those common conversations. I see a lot of men with male endocrine problems, so I wrote a few posts on how the endocrine system works in a man and how it can be fixed if needed. I wrote about concerns like, can a man’s underwear cause problems with his sperm? At first, I shut off comments after two weeks, but I quickly realized that many people found my posts not by reading the blog start to finish, but through a search for a specific concern. That makes a lot of sense: I do that, too. People would be coming at a post weeks, months, or even years after I wrote it. My third post on April 28th, 2010, How Clomid Works in Men, is still my most visited one with 874 comments as of today.

After a while, people started asking great questions in the comments. Sometimes I could answer them in a couple of lines in the comments section, but some required longer answers. I added posts for a few of these great questions. Understandably, although I tried to make it very prominent in the FAQ, people would still ask me medical questions about themselves and their loved ones. It’s really frustrating, but I can’t answer them. I don’t have the basic information through the web that all doctors need to make a diagnosis and treat a patient, which includes a physical examination. I need to see people in person to be their doctor.

As the blog evolved, I began posting about news events, important scientific studies, and general items of interest in male health. But most people still come across the blog by searching for a specific problem or question, and that’s the way it mainly seems to work. So for those who read a post from years past and have a question, I’ll often recommend reading the comments and other posts on the blog, as the answers are usually there.

But if you’re interested in male health, and you want a more up-to-date stream of information, then follow me on Twitter. I post pretty frequently there, often with links to important news articles about male health and the other parts of my job in science, engineering, and education. You’ll even see my human side from time to time. I’ll of course still write here on this blog when the need for more words arises.

See you in the Twitterverse!

An article in press in Fertility and Sterility is getting a lot of media attention. The study connected men seeking infertility care to a cancer registry in the State where the clinic was located. The researchers found that men with infertility had almost twice the chance of getting cancer and almost three times the chance if the man had no sperm in his ejaculate.

The authors of the study have a few theories about why cancer and male infertility may be connected. Cells need to divide just right to make sperm in the testes, and problems with division could lead to both problems with making sperm and the kind of bad division that makes cancer. It could also be that toxic substances in the environment may lead to both infertility and cancer.

Whatever the reason, we’re beginning to understand that problems with male fertility are just a tip of a much bigger iceberg that involves health in general. It’s more than just about the testicles.

I was quoted in Time Magazine in an article on “Frontiers of Fertility“. For those interested, it’s a nice read.

As I’ve written before in this blog, clomiphene is an effective if off-label treatment for men with low testosterone who want to preserve their fertility. If used directly, testosterone itself actually decreases the making of testosterone and sperm in a man’s testis. Clomiphene increases testosterone production in the testis by increasing the pituitary hormones that tell the testis to make testosterone.

In the March issue of Fertility and Sterility, a journal that I co-edit with Dr. Antonio Pellicer, Drs. Kim and co-authors review the published medical literature on treating low testosterone with clomiphene and other drugs besides testosterone. They conclude that clomiphene is a safe and effective treatment for men with low testosterone and note that less than one year of treatment with testosterone is usually reversible if a man wants his fertility to return. Unfortunately, we don’t know all that much about longer treatments with testosterone, and many men who have been on testosterone for several years do not have sperm return even with other forms of treatment.

Drs Kim and co-authors give us a nice review that supports the use of clomiphene for men with low testosterone who want to preserve their fertility.

Google is an amazing place. It seems like almost everything is there. A traditional way for doctors and scientists to search published studies is by using the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed site. I use it a lot, as it contains only peer-reviewed medical studies. Google has a similar resource called “Google Scholar.” I made a Google Scholar profile, and you can see what I’ve written there. Check it out!