They Discover That Chlamydia Causes Infertility in Men
A team of Spanish researchers has found that men with chlamydia infection, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted human disease most prevalent in the world, produces infertility in one hundred percent of the cases studied.
This was explained to Efe Professor of Genetics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) Jaime Goslvez, coauthor of the research and creator, along with two other researchers at the Hospital Juan Canalejo de La Corua (northwest) of the “new” technique with which they have found a correlation between chlamydial infection and the inability to fertilize.
The study, which will be published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, reveals that the semen of infected men by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis has levels of DNA damage between 35 and 45 percent, while healthy people, those levels are approximately 15 percent.
According Goslvez during the investigation, developed in collaboration with the University of Nuevo Len (Mexico), found that chlamydia “shatters the DNA, although the infection that causes no symptoms and does not affect normal semen parameters of concentration, morphology and motility of sperm.
The researchers also discovered, after applying in men infected antibiotic treatment three or four month that the DNA damage that chlamydia causes can be partly repaired, and that it is possible to recover fertility.
According to the scientist, the importance of the find lies in both the number of people affected by this bacteria (two thirds of women and half men the world), as in the difficulty so far was for them.
The team is currently working on research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Queensland (Australia) on chlamydia in koalas, a species whose presence in forests of the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales is increasingly scarce.
Goslvez has advanced the goal is to determine whether the bacteria also causes infertility and can affect the size of the population of these animals, which rely on analyzing the future in other species which, it said, “Chlamydia could be leading to their extinction. “
