By Rosie Beauchamp - Reuters 23/2/2009.
The research, lead by Dr Thomas Walsh at the University California San Francisco, studied data collectedfrom 22,562 male partners of couples seeing fertility treatment in Califonian fertility clinics from 1967 to 1998. From this sample, 4549 of men were diagnosed with male factor infertility based on a clinical presentation of abnormal semen. These men were linked to the California Cancer registry and were studied between 1998 and 2004 for any signs to testicular cancer.
By comparing the results of those men with male factor infertility with the rest of the population it was found that men who had the condition were 2.8 times more likley to develop testicular germ cell cancer less than a year after seeking infertility treatment.
Although the link has been made between those seeking infertility treatment and the development of testicular cancer, Dr Walsh, now at the University of Washington, and his fellow researchers doubted that the link was caused by infertilty treatment itself. It has been hypothesised that sertain forms of male infertility are connected with faulty DNA repair, which is also associated with the development of tumours.
Another postulated explanation is that envionmental factors could underline both fertility and testicular cancer. In relation to this possibility it was noted that there has been a continual increase in the incidence of testicular cancer in the last 30 to 50 years. The report observed that during the same period there is no evidence of a decline in semen quality and fertility in industrialised nations... it is unclear whether the two trends are interdependant or related to one another.
The report concluded by asserting that more research is needed to be done that is focussed on the etiology of poor germ cell health in these populations.