Sperm Counts Continue to Fall

Men’s sperm have been decreasing in number and getting worse at swimming for some time now—and, at least in the United States and Europe, new research says it’s getting worse. A pair of new studies unveiled this week at the Scientific Congress of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in Denver suggest that American and European men’s sperm count and sperm motility—that is, the “swimming” ability of sperm cells—have declined in the past decade, which follows a similar, broader trend observed by many scientists over the past few decades.

One study presented at the ASRM summit, conducted jointly by a fertility center in New Jersey and a fertility center in Spain, found that the percentage of nearly 120,000 male infertility patients whose total motile sperm count) decreased from 85 percent in the 2002–05 period to 79 percent in the period of 2014–17. The percentage of patients whose TMSC clocked in between zero and 5 million, meanwhile, increased from 9 percent to more than 11.5 percent.