Spinal cord injury and male infertility: a review

• Autor(a) principal: Falavigna,Asdrubal
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Finger,Guilherme, Souza,Olívia Egger de, Pasqualotto,Fabio Firmbach
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Coluna/Columna
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1808-18512012000400015
• topic: Spinal cord injuries, Infertility; Hyperbaric oxygenation; Erectile dysfunction; Trauma to the nervous system

Spinal cord injuries remain an important factor of morbimortality in current society, involving mainly males from adolescence to adulthood. Among the sequelae caused by spinal cord injuries, the impairment of the sexual system is highly relevant since it affects the quality of sexual life and paternity. Infertility is secondary to multiple events such as erectile dysfunction, anejaculation, seminal biochemical modification and morphology of spermatozoa. Current therapies for the infertile spinal cord injured patient focus on the ejaculation stimulus followed by intrauterine insemination, leaving seminal low quality as the major factor of infertility in these patients. In this scenario, therapy with hyperbaric oxygenation, which is still being studied, represents an alternative treatment since it focuses on the central nervous system injured by the trauma and the testicular tissue in order to decrease spinal damage and to preserve the physiological regulation of the urogenital system as a form of avoiding infertility.