May 31, 2019
Vidcast: https://youtu.be/GV9b0yDqklU
Banking tissue with sperm-producing cells may be an alternative for those boys and even older males too young or too sick to bank sperm prior to medical treatments that threaten their later fertility. This conclusion comes from an 8 year study recently published in the journal Human Reproduction.
As many as 2,000 boys and young men undergo sterilizing chemotherapy and radiation therapy for cancer eradication. To preserve the possibility that they may later father children, a pilot study looked at the testicular tissue samples from 189 males undergoing such therapy. Their ages ranged from 5 months to 34 years with an average of 8 years.
Seventy-five percent of each tissue sample was cryopreserved for the patient’s later use. The remainder was utilized for research into optimal methods for freezing, thawing, and potentially separating normal stem cells from tumor cells.
The study did demonstrate that sperm-generating cells may be successfully recovered from such tissue. It remains to be shown whether these so-called spermatogonia can produce normal, motile sperm capable of fertilizing a human egg.
If your young son is undergoing cancer chemotherapy or radiotherapy, do ask his doctors about testicular tissue banking.
H Valli-Pulaski, K A Peters, K Gassei, etal. Testicular tissue cryopreservation: 8 years of experience from a coordinated network of academic centers. Human Reproduction, 2019; DOI: 10.1093/humrep/dez043
#Sperm #testiculartissue #malefertility #menhealth #urology #cancer