The impact of BMI on sperm parameters and the metabolite changes of seminal plasma concomitantly.

Dan Guo,Shanlei Qiao,Lingqing Hu,Minjian Chen,Yankai Xia,Mengying Teng,Chuncheng Lu,Hongjuan Ding,Qiuqin Tang,Daozhen Chen,Yiqiu Chen,Wei Wu,Jiahao Sha,Xinru Wang

doi:10.18632/oncotarget.14950

Abstract

The development of male infertility increased rapidly worldwide, which coinciding with the epidemic of obesity. However, the impact of weight abnormalities on sperm quality is still contestable. To assess the correlation between BMI and sperm parameters, we searched relevant articles in PubMed, Embase, Web of science, and Wanfang database published until June 2015 without language restriction. Otherwise, we also recruited some participants who attended fertility clinic as well as some general populations in this report. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis about BMI and sperm parameters containing total sperm count, concentration, semen volume and sperm motility (overall and progressive). Metabolomic analysis of seminal plasma was performed to explore the mechanism from a new perspective. This study found standardized weighted mean differences (SMD) in sperm parameters (total sperm count, sperm concentration, and semen volume) of abnormal weight groups decreased to different degree compared to normal weight. Dose-response analysis found SMD of sperm count, sperm concentration and semen volume respectively fell 2.4%, 1.3% and 2.0% compared with normal weight for every 5-unit increase in BMI. Metabolomic analysis of seminal plasma showed that spermidine and spermine were likely to play a vital role in the spermatogenesis progress. This systematic review with meta-analysis has confirmed there was a relationship between BMI and sperm quality, suggesting obesity may be a detrimental factor of male infertility.

Highlights

The development of assisted reproductive technology and its exponential increase usage have reflected, to a certain extent, infertility has become a serious worldwide problem
Along with the prevalence of obesity in the world that the proportion of men who are overweight (BMI ≧ 25) is 36.9% in 2013 [5], and at the same time, infertility often coexists with obesity, many investigators put their eyes on the impact of body mass index on sperm quality
From the meta-analysis, we found overweight decreased the quality of total sperm count and semen volume (P = 0.000 and 0.002), obesity decreased the quality of total sperm count, sperm concentration, and semen volume

Summary

Introduction

The development of assisted reproductive technology and its exponential increase usage have reflected, to a certain extent, infertility has become a serious worldwide problem. Since 2013, many new relevant researches published in succession, including some consistent with the conclusion of MacDonald et al [12,13,14,15], and some got the same result with Sermondade et al [8, 16,17,18,19] It was surprising the participant numbers of some studies are unprecedented, for instance, Stephanie Belloc et al recruited 10665 men and Chih-Wei Tsao et al recruited 7630 men to evaluate the association between BMI and semen characteristics in 2014 and 2015, respectively [8, 18]

Methods

Results

Conclusion