(no subject)

[iximunchkinixi.livejournal.com]

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Look out, men -- smoking and drinking
alcohol may affect the quality of your semen.

A group of investigators from Argentina found that men who both drank
alcohol and smoked cigarettes were more likely to have a smaller amount
of semen, a lower concentration of sperm, and a lower percentage of
active sperm than abstainers.


However, these semen alterations were present only in men who both
smoked and drank, and not in men with one habit but not the other.


For a normally fertile man, the reductions in semen quality are not
enough to render him infertile, study author Dr. Marta Fiol de Cuneo told
Reuters Health. However, in men who already have fertility problems,
these sperm changes might make the situation worse, she said.


"In conjunction with another deleterious factors they would diminish
male fertility," said the researcher, who is based at the Universidad
Nacional de Cordoba.


Cuneo explained that smoking and drinking together may exert "additive"
or "synergistic" effects. In the case of synergy, this would mean that
one factor enhances the effects of the other, she explained.


In the journal Fertility and Sterility, she and her colleagues write
that previous research has investigated the effects of either smoking or
drinking on semen quality, with mixed results. However, many of those
studies looked at only a small group of men, involved men who may have
infertility problems, or could not separate the effects of smoking from
drinking, since those habits often go hand in hand, they note.


To investigate the question further, Cuneo and her colleagues asked
almost 4,000 men between the ages of 29 and 36 about their smoking and
drinking habits, and tested their semen.


The researchers found that men who both smoked and drank showed changes
in semen quality, which were not seen in men who had neither or either
of these habits.


Men who drank less than 500 milliliters of wine per day - roughly
equivalent to 3 glasses - had the same risk of semen changes as men who
drank more, and men who limited their cigarettes to less than 20 per day
showed similar risks to heavier smokers.


"Men who wish to procreate should be specifically warned of this
matter," Cuneo and her colleagues write.

Comments

[skeptictank.livejournal.com]

So I guess you could say that dating/marrying a real heavy smoker/drinker is a form of birth control?

I can't say I'm surprised.

[krasota.livejournal.com]

Or, you might just have kids with low birth weight, asthma, and slow development.

Now, it would work as birth control for *me*, simply because I would never live with, much less boink someone who was a regular drinker and smoker. Heck, the smoking alone would send me fleeing.

[skeptictank.livejournal.com]

I guess I lucked out. I finally got a boy who doesn't smoke anything ever and can only handle about 1 beer at a time.