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Unnecessary testicular surgery for the infertile man

A common fashion these days in some IVF clinics is to doTESE-ICSIfor men with severeoligoasthenospermia ( low sperm count).

This is justified by saying that these men with " abnormal sperm" havehigh sperm DNA fragmentation, and this will result in poor fertilisation and poor quality embryos.

The solution they propose is extracting sperm directly from the testes, by doing a TESE, the theory presumably being that testicular sperm will not have as much DNA fragmentation because they are "fresh".

Of course, it also goes without saying that doing an additional procedure allows the IVF clinic to charge more !

This is complete rubbish, and TESE should only be done for men withazoospermia ( zero sperm count).

If there are sperm in the semen, then these should be used for doing ICSI - there is no need to use testicular sperm at all

Please don't let the doctor assault your testes for no rhyme or reason !

Authored by : Dr Aniruddha Malpani, MD and reviewed by Dr Anjali Malpani.