Estimation of the concentrations of manganese, nickel, and aluminum in the semen of infertile men as oxidative stress factors

Abstract

Semen samples were collected from healthy people (control group for comparison), asthenospermia infertility patients, and unexplained infertility patients from male donors who attended the Fertility Center at Al-Sadr Teaching Hospital in Al-Najaf Al-Ashraf / Iraq for the period from 1/12/2020 to 25/3 /2021. The present study aims to estimate the concentration of manganese, nickel, and aluminum in semen as one of the factors that cause oxidative stress in male infertility. The atomic absorption spectrometry was used to estimate the concentrations of the elements and the statistical analysis by the Tukey One Way method in the Graph Pad Prism program to determine the relationships between the study elements and the parameters of semen in men. The results of the study showed a significant increase (P < 0.05) in the level of nickel and aluminum concentrations (490 ± 27.57 and 450.3 ± 17.92 μg/L, respectively) and a significant decrease (P < 0.05) in the concentration of manganese (202 ± 8.718 ppm). ) in the semen group of men with asthenospermia in comparison with the healthy fertile group (as a control group) (161.7 ± 5.963, 307.5 ± 10.58 μg/L and 309.2 ± 1.470 ppm), respectively. The results also revealed the existence of many negative relationships between the concentration of elements and semen parameters and between the same concentrations. The study concluded that the concentrations of these elements are a factor of stress oxidants that appear in cases of asthenozoospermia or may not change in other types of infertility and remain unexplained infertility.