Fertility preservation for male patients – why, when and how?

There is no time limit. Many case reports have shown that men have frozen sperm for over 20 years, and they’ve had healthy babies, so there’s no time limit for using the sperm if it’s frozen. It’s just a matter of choice whenever you’re ready to start your family building journey.

Medically, there’s no time limit, but what’s important I did not mention is that here in the U.S., freezing sperm may cost between 700- 800 US dollars, and then on an annual basis, the storage fees may be about 1000 dollars per year. Sometimes people look at those numbers, and they have to put a time limit on how long they’re going to store sperm just because of the cost, but medically it can be frozen indefinitely. There is a cost of storage fees, some sperm banks will give 3 to 5 years of storage for sometimes 2 or 3 thousand dollars, so it all depends upon the sperm bank.

Typically, it’s going to be oxidative stress. Oxidative stress comes from diet, the best way to treat that is with a good male multivitamin or antioxidants or a good diet. I always push my clients on fish oil, and fish oil has shown to decrease DNA fragmentation. Other things that can cause DNA fragmentation are environmental, such as smoking, poor diet, all those things can lead to DNA fragmentation, but it’s reversible by using antioxidants.

If one medication doesn’t work, then they will always go to a different medication. If you start with Clomiphene, then you try that for 3 months, if that doesn’t work, you’ll switch over to Letrozole, unless someone has side effects or has a contraindication where they can’t take it. We recommend either one, and it depends upon preference and what you’re looking to accomplish. They’re both equally effective as far as improving sperm in men.

Typically start with Clomiphene. Most people using Clomiphene are taking 25 milligrams every other day, and the dose of Letrozole is 5 milligrams every other day as well.

It’s not a value of FSH or LH, here in the U.S., we tend to start with the least invasive treatment, which is the oral medications Clomiphene and Letrozole and then move to the more invasive such as injections with gonadotrophins. The problem here in the U.S. is that gonadotrophin injection therapy may run about a thousand dollars per device with a pin, which tends to be very expensive. We try to start with the most cost-effective treatment, which is the oral medication, so we don’t use it directly, we use it mostly in couples or men who have not had success with the oral medication.

There’s no risk involved in freezing sperm.

In the first scenario, the fact that you had a much better response to the second egg donor means that it may have been an egg issue with the first egg donor. I would imagine the first one could have been an egg issue, particularly if you had the same sperm with a different egg donor and got much better quality embryos 5 out of 9.

Statistically, in nature, 50% of fertilized eggs will become a blastocyst, and that 25% will lead to a healthy blastocyst. It all depends upon how many eggs you’re starting with, how many are fertilized, then you’ll see how many develop. Looking at the individual age of the egg donor, someone who is 30 and below, you’d expect to have at least anywhere between 30 to 40% abnormality rates, that’s what the data shows. With your second donor, you had an excellent outcome.

That’s very minimal contraindications of using Letrozole. There are more contraindications with Clomiphene than you’ll see with Letrozole. If anyone has a history of migraines, anyone having a history of visual disturbances, you will stay away from Clomiphene, which affects those organs.

There’s no contraindication to using Letrozole unless, of course, they’ve had an allergic reaction to it the first time they took it or side effects that were unbearable the first time they took it, but there’s nothing as far as contraindications that stand out.

Typically, not because of the way the sperm is processed, you’re washing away the sperm that’s poor quality, so you’re left with a better quality sperm. There are new devices that are out there to separate the sperm a little better.

There’s something called a Zymote, which’s a new technology where only the sperm that have normal heads and tails can swim through, so you’re selecting up the sperm that are damaged with DNA fragmented DNA, but this routine handling of the sperm doing the IVF process does not cause DNA impairment.

 I believe it’s a good option to use Letrozole or Clomiphene, I don’t have an issue with having everyone take Letrozole, I think it’s a good drug to improve sperm counts.

The results depend upon how responsive they are to the treatment, but in general, we’ve had good results with the Letrozole. When you talk about non-obstructive azoospermia, a good result doesn’t mean they go to a normal sperm count, a good result means that we can get them to the point where they have enough sperm to actually go through an IVF process or maybe have enough sperm for an IUI procedure.

I would say try to freeze another sample instead of waiting just because as you get older, the sperm quality and concentration will decline, so I would try to freeze as much as you can this year, and it all depends upon your goals in the future.

If you already have 7 or 8 samples of sperm frozen, that should be enough for any sort of treatment you desire inseminations or IVF, but if you’re going to produce more, I would do it sooner than later.