Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 10 pp 4326—4335
Sperm DNA integrity is critically impacted by male age but does not influence outcomes of artificial insemination by husband in the Chinese infertile couples
- 1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Key Laboratory for Major Obstetric Diseases of Guangdong Province, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510150, China
- 2 Key Laboratory of Reproduction and Genetics of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510150, China
- 3 Guangzhou Key Laboratory for Clinical Rapid Diagnosis and Early Warning of Infectious Diseases, Kingmed School of Laboratory Medicine, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510182, China
- 4 Department of Clinical Laboratory, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510150, China
Received: December 13, 2021 Accepted: April 25, 2022 Published: May 17, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204058How to Cite
Copyright: © 2022 Luo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA) is crucial for assessing male fertility. However, the predictive value of the SCSA parameters, including the DNA fragment indices (DFI) and the percentages of high DNA stainability (HDS), for outcomes of artificial insemination by husband (AIH) remains controversial. This study aims to evaluate the correlations between SCSA parameters and male aging as well as other routine semen parameters, and explore their prognostic powers on AIH outcomes of the Chinese infertile couples. A total of 809 AIH cycles were retrospectively analyzed. The results showed that DFI in the age groups < 35 years were significantly lower than that in the age groups ≥ 35 years (P < 0.001). Meanwhile, there was no statistical difference in HDS between the age groups (P = 0.063). DFI and HDS are negatively correlated with most routine semen parameters (all P < 0.05). The chi-square and generalized linear model tests indicated that neither DFI nor HDS influenced the clinical pregnancy rate of AIH. In summary, this study found that aging is a critical factor leading to increased sperm DFI but not HDS. DFI and HDS are negatively correlated with most semen parameters but do not significantly influence AIH outcomes.