Endocrine Abstracts

Male infertility is a worldwide healthcare issue, which has driven developed countries to take the necessary steps in detecting and treating the problem. While transition countries such as North Macedonia and most of the surrounding states belonging to the Western Balkans, usually blame the female partner for infertility, thus male factor is underestimated. The term ‘milieu intérieur’ means also a perfect equilibrium between reactive oxygen species (ROS) and antioxidant capacity (AC), crucial for physio-pathological effects on sperm maturation and capacitation, but not only. Oral antioxidants have been shown to diminish oxidative stress (OS) and improve semen parameters, mostly sperm motility and concentration. For this purposes we enrolled 37 infertile males. First semen sample was collected at the time of enrollment in the study. From this 0.5 ml was used for standard semen analysis, while 1.2 ml for evaluating OS parameters such as malonedialdehyde (MDA) and protein carbonyl (PC). A second sample was collected after 6 months of antioxidant treatment. Mean, Standard Deviation, the Pearson Correlation and paired student t-test (since normal distribution was tested by Shapiro-Wilk test) were used for statistical analyses. Levels of MDA are negatively correlated with sperm motility (r = –0.53) and sperm concentration (r = –0.19), so show and levels of PC with sperm motility (r = –0.36) and sperm concentration (r = –0.12). After six months of treatment the semen parameters such as concentration and motility, improve significantly (P < 0.001), MDA also decreases significantly (P < 0.001), PC was also lower after the treatment, but was not statistically significant (P = 0.0554). Antioxidants improve semen parameters in terms of concentration and motility, and dramatically reduced the oxidative stress markers. Considering cost-efficiency of oral antioxidant administration to infertile men, the potential advantages that such treatment offers cannot be ignored. Our suggestion is that Antioxidants should be used on a routine basis in cases of idiopathic male infertility. Anyway, further randomized controlled trial on larger sample size for standardization of doses and duration of supplementation are needed.

Keywords: male infertility, semen parameters, malonedialdehyde, protein carbonyl, antioxidants.