Sperm Count Plummeting In American Men, Study Finds

NEW YORK, NY — If a melting glacier or mass contagion or wildlife revolt or zombie uprising doesn't stamp out this silly civilization of ours by mid-century, it appears we've got a pretty reliable Plan B.

A research team operating out of Israel and New York City recently dug up and vetted some 7,500 different sperm-count studies from the past four decades, then analyzed results from the 185 studies they deemed bulletproof to form some the most comprehensive — and foreboding — conclusions in the field to date.

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In short: Their study found that males in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand are now producing less than half the sperm they did some 40 years ago.

In 2011, the average sperm count in Western males was nearly 60 percent lower than in 1973, the new study showed.

Sperm counts dropped 1.5 percent or so each year, researchers found — a rate that appeared to pick up pace with each passing year.

By these calculations, even if the rate of sperm decline stays the same going forward, Western men could be all but impotent by the year 2045. (Barring sort sort of "leveling off" at a certain threshold or another last-minute intervention by Mother Nature that scientists can't currently foresee.)

"If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future," Hagai Levine, the study's lead researcher, told the BBC on Tuesday.

"Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general," he said — "and it may be the extinction of the human species."

So We're Doomed?

Levine spent nearly a decade on his new study, splitting his time between the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (In fact, a librarian on the Mt. Sinai campus, Rachel Pinotti, is listed as one of his co-authors. "No one pays attention to the librarian" digging up research for scientific studies, Levine told Patch in a phone interview Tuesday. "But in this case," he said, "the librarian was extremely helpful to the team.")

Asked if he truly thought extinction was a possibility, Levine said that while it's "a difficult message to deliver," the results of his study are clear.

"I think it touches every one of us," the Israeli researcher told Patch. "This is the survival of the species — we must reproduce. It’s the most important thing. But we tend to neglect it."

Historically, he said, fertility scientists "put much more emphasis on the female. It's a cultural issue: We tend to see reproduction as a female responsibility, when it’s really a couple thing."

But Levine said the climate into which he's releasing his study is much more receptive than the one that may have buried similar findings in the past. He's been pleasantly surprised, he said, at how seriously the scientific community is taking his new results, apocalyptic as they may be.

Is The Rest Of The World Doomed Too?

Sperm from nearly 43,000 men were examined in Levine's study.

Interestingly, though, sperm counts in men from South America, Asia and Africa showed "no significant declines" in the past four decades.

This odd discrepancy may have to do, at least in part, with the fact that such a smaller number of studies were conducted in those countries, and/or that their labs may not have been advanced enough to ensure precise results, Levine told Patch.

"Our conclusion is not that there’s no decline" in non-Western sperm counts, he said. "Our conclusion is that there is not enough data."

Still: It did appear to Levine and his team that if there has been a sperm drop in South America, Asia and Africa, it’s been a little less steep than in Western countries. (So far, at least.)

This could have to do with the fact that Western populations began to be exposed to chemicals, carcinogens, pesticides, etc., a few decades before non-Western countries, Levine said. For example, he said, "plastic first became very popular in the United States."

But if that's the case, and all the nasty stuff we pump into our food and air and environment is indeed to blame for the gradual extinction of human sperm, it ostensibly won't be long before this manmade nastiness permeates every corner of the Earth — and non-Western societies begin to see a similar trend among their men.

So What Now?

Levine's study doesn't delve very far into the possible reasons behind the apparent drying-up of Western sperm. It does, however, reference past research showing sperm may be sensitive to "environmental influences" like carcinogens, pesticides and heat, and "lifestyle factors" like diet, stress, smoking and body weight.

Now, with such clear evidence that Western sperm is drying up faster than ever, Levine said he hopes more researchers start asking why this is happening — and what can be done to stop it.

"For a long time, there was a denial of the decline," Levine said. "Now we can see the decline is real. So now we can argue about the causes."

But Are We Totally Sure This Is A Thing?

Like all studies, of course, Levine's has its doubters.

Prof. Allan Pacey of Sheffield University in the U.K., a loud critic of previous sperm-count research, told the Financial Times he wasn't entirely convinced that all the old studies and numbers employed by the current study were sound enough to make such definitive conclusions.

The public should “treat this study with caution, as the debate has not yet been resolved and there is clearly much work still to be done," Pacey said Tuesday.

Still, he told the BBC he was impressed to see that Levine's latest work "deals head-on with many of the deficiencies of previous studies."

You can read the full study here.

What do you think: Are you buying what scientists are selling? Is this the end of Western civilization as we know it? Let us know at simone.wilson@patch.com.

Photo by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann/Flickr