Male infertility in Indian men linked to lifestyle choices and hormonal imbalances
“Lifestyle habits and hormonal imbalances significantly affect the fertility of men”
2025-10-10
(Press-News.org)
“Lifestyle habits and hormonal imbalances significantly affect the fertility of men.”
BUFFALO, NY — October 10, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Volume 12 of Oncoscience on September 30, 2025, titled “Lifestyle and hormonal factors affecting semen quality and sperm DNA integrity: A cross-sectional study.”
In this study, Saniya Imtiyaz Chamanmalik, Rajendra B. Nerli, and Pankaja Umarane from KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research and Dr. D. Y. Patil Medical College, Hospital and Research Centre discovered that some lifestyle choices and hormone changes can significantly impact men’s reproductive health. These findings are especially important as male infertility continues to increase in India and around the world.
Infertility affects one in six couples globally, with male-related factors contributing to nearly half of all cases. This study addressed a major research gap in India by examining how modifiable behaviors and hormone levels influence semen quality and the genetic integrity of sperm.
The researchers studied 278 Indian men aged 21 to 50. Nearly half of the participants showed abnormal semen parameters. While older age did not reduce semen volume or motility, men over 40 had higher levels of sperm DNA fragmentation, a key marker of genetic damage and reduced fertility potential.
The study found strong associations between poor lifestyle choices and reduced sperm function. Tobacco and alcohol use significantly lowered sperm count, motility, and shape. Alcohol also increased sperm DNA fragmentation, which could negatively affect embryo development. Men exposed to high temperatures at work had more DNA-damaged sperm, showing the harmful impact of heat. Body weight also played a major role: both underweight and overweight men had lower semen quality and higher DNA damage compared to men of normal weight.
“Tobacco and alcohol use were strongly associated with reduced sperm concentration, motility, and morphology (p < 0.001).”
In addition to lifestyle factors, the study also highlighted the role of hormones in male fertility. Men with low testosterone or high prolactin levels had worse semen profiles. Notably, low levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) were strongly associated with higher sperm DNA fragmentation. Since AMH is produced by cells that support sperm development, it may serve as a useful new marker of sperm health. Levels of other hormones like FSH and LH remained stable, suggesting that targeted hormone testing could improve fertility assessment.
This study used the most recent World Health Organization guidelines for semen analysis and included advanced exams for sperm DNA fragmentation. The results suggest that traditional semen testing may miss important indicators of fertility. Including lifestyle evaluation and hormone profiling could help identify reproductive problems earlier and lead to more effective treatments.
While the study was limited to a single center and did not include long-term follow-up, it provided valuable information about the growing challenge of male infertility in India. The findings support public health efforts to promote healthier lifestyles and regular hormone screening. Future research may help determine whether lifestyle changes or hormone therapies can repair sperm damage and improve fertility outcomes.
Continue reading: DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/oncoscience.627
Correspondence to: Rajendra B. Nerli – rajendranerli@yahoo.in
Abstract video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRGuhSISlOA
Keywords: male infertility, lifestyle risk factors, sperm chromatin dispersion test, sperm DNA fragmentation, reproductive hormones
Click here to sign up for free Altmetric alerts about this article.
About Oncoscience:
Oncoscience is a peer-reviewed, open-access, traditional journal covering the rapidly growing field of cancer research, especially emergent topics not currently covered by other journals. This journal has a special mission: Freeing oncology from publication cost. It is free for the readers and the authors.
Oncoscience is indexed and archived by PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, META (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) (2018-2022), and Dimensions (Digital Science).
To learn more about Oncoscience, visit Oncoscience.us and connect with us on social media:
X
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
LinkedIn
Click here to subscribe to Oncoscience publication updates.
For media inquiries, please contact media@impactjournals.com.
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2025-10-10
Recent research has achieved significant advances in acoustofluidic technologies for efficient isolation and biomarker-specific detection of small extracellular vesicles (sEVs). Nevertheless, rapid and high-sensitivity analysis of low-volume clinical samples remains challenging, often requiring multi-step preprocessing and bulky instrumentation. By integrating sharp-edge microstructures with acoustically induced vortices, we enable size-selective concentration of target-bound complexes for immediate fluorescence readout. "The acoustofluidic chip leverages localized acoustic streaming to spatially separate microbead-sEV conjugates from ...
2025-10-10
Cancer remains a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality. Traditional therapies like chemotherapy and radiotherapy are often limited by their lack of specificity, leading to systemic toxicity and the emergence of drug resistance. Nanoparticles, with dimensions ranging from 1 to 100 nm, offer a sophisticated solution. Their unique physicochemical properties allow them to navigate biological barriers and can be engineered for active targeting (e.g., using ligands for overexpressed cancer cell receptors) or passive targeting (exploiting the Enhanced Permeability and Retention effect of tumor vasculature). The cellular uptake ...
2025-10-10
Light bulbs come in many shapes and styles: globes, twists, flame-like candle tips and long tubes. But there aren’t many thin options. Now, researchers report in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they have created a paper-thin LED that gives off a warm, sun-like glow. The LEDs could light up the next generation of phone and computer screens and other light sources while helping users avoid disruptions to their sleep patterns.
“This work demonstrates the feasibility of ultra-thin, large-area quantum dot LEDs that closely match the solar spectrum,” says Xianghua Wang, a corresponding author of the study. “These devices could enable next-generation eye-friendly ...
2025-10-10
The global increase in migration—with approximately 3.6% of the global population living as expatriates—has resulted in many countries extending external voting rights to their overseas citizens. This has prompted scholarly interest in understanding the electoral participation of immigrants in their countries of origin. However, most research has focused on the factors that drive the provision of external voting rights to expatriates rather than the extent to which these rights are exercised. Furthermore, prior research has largely overlooked the political behavior of undocumented immigrants, who constitute a significant share of the immigrant population, especially in the United ...
2025-10-10
Fukuoka, Japan—Publishing in npj Spintronics, a research team led by Kyushu University have developed a new fabrication method for energy-efficient magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) using a new material called thulium iron garnet (TmIG) that has been attracting global attention for its ability to enable high-speed, low-power information rewriting at room temperature. The team hopes their findings will lead to significant improvements in the speed and power efficiency of high-computing hardware, such as those used to power generative AI.
The rapid spread of generative ...
2025-10-10
Levitation has long been pursued by stage magicians and physicists alike. For audiences, the sight of objects floating midair is wondrous. For scientists, it’s a powerful way of isolating objects from external disturbances. This is particularly useful in case of rotors, as their torque and angular momentum, used to measure gravity, gas pressure, momentum, among other phenomena in both classical and quantum physics, can be strongly influenced by friction. Freely suspending the rotor could drastically reduce these disturbances – and now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed, created, and analyzed such a macroscopic device, bringing ...
2025-10-10
Researchers have created a polymer “Chinese lantern” that can snap into more than a dozen curved, three-dimensional shapes by compressing or twisting the original structure. This rapid shape-shifting behavior can be controlled remotely using a magnetic field, allowing the structure to be used for a variety of applications.
The basic lantern object is made by cutting a polymer sheet into a diamond-like parallelogram shape, then cutting a row of parallel lines across the center of each sheet. This creates a row of identical ribbons that is connected by a solid ...
2025-10-10
In the future, could our mobile phones and internet data operate using light rather than just electricity? Now, for the first time, an international research team led by CNRS researchers1 has discovered how to generate an electron gas, found for example in LED screens, by illuminating a material made up of layers of oxides2. When the light is switched off, the gas disappears. This phenomenon, which lies at the interface of optics and electronics, paves the way for numerous applications in electronics, spintronics and quantum computing. It is described in an article to be published on 10 October in the journal Nature Materials.
Electronic components that can be controlled by light ...
2025-10-10
Smaller than a speck of dust and shaped like tiny discs, coccolithophores are microscopic ocean organisms with a big climate job. They draw carbon out of seawater, help produce oxygen, and their calcite plates sink to form chalk and limestone that preserve Earth’s climate history. Today, five European research organisations launched an initiative to make 10 October International Coccolithophore Day, highlighting their crucial role in regulating the planet’s carbon balance, producing oxygen, and sustaining the ocean ecosystems that underpin all life.
The campaign is led by the Ruđer Bošković Institute (Zagreb, Croatia), the ...
2025-10-10
Stress sensitivity increases the frequency, intensity, and variability of suicidal thoughts among the university community. These are the findings of a longitudinal study coordinated by the Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Pompeu Fabra University, which analyses survey data from more than 700 university students. The study defines, for the first time, three degrees of passive suicidal ideation according to their frequency, intensity and increasing variability. Taking stress sensitivity into account could have an impact on suicide prevention.
Suicide is the first cause of death among young people aged between 15 and 29 in Spain and ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Male infertility in Indian men linked to lifestyle choices and hormonal imbalances
“Lifestyle habits and hormonal imbalances significantly affect the fertility of men”
