By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
THE effects of the male equivalent of the Pill should be easily reversible, a study shows.
The contraceptive will never be widely used unless men can be sure that once they stop taking it their sperm counts will return to normal. To test that this is true of the combinations of implants and pills used so far in trials, a team led by Peter Liu, of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute, examined 30 studies on the male Pill published between 1990 and 2005.
The trials have shown that it is possible to reduce the male sperm count to “infertile” levels by using hormone treatments, either in the form of pills, implants, or both. Two trials are in progress, one in China and one in Europe, to prove that the technology works and is safe. But the new study, published in The Lancet, aimed to show that the effects were reversible.
The conclusion was that, in the studies examined, sperm counts returned to a level of 20 million per millilitre — a fertile level — in three to four months.Older men, those of Asian origin, those who had higher sperm counts to start with, and those who took shorter-acting treatments, recovered fertility more quickly. But the trials show that all men will recover fertility — if they had it to start with — if they are prepared to wait long enough.
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