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Did you know that, if you're trying to get pregnant, don't let let your husband wear sunscreen? That's because some sunscreen ingredients may disrupt sperm cell function, according to newswise.com. Many ultraviolet (UV)-filtering chemicals commonly used in sunscreens interfere with the function of human sperm cells, and some mimic the effect of the female hormone progesterone, a new study finds.  “These results are of concern and might explain in part why unexplained infertility is so prevalent,” says the study’s senior investigator, Niels Skakkebaek, MD, DMSc, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and a researcher at the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet. Although the purpose of the chemical UV filters is to reduce the amount of the sun’s UV rays getting through the skin by absorbing UV, some UV filters are rapidly absorbed through the skin, Skakkebaek says. UV filter chemicals reportedly have been found in human blood samples and in 95 ...

Want to get pregnant?  Don't shop so much. Really. Competition for social status may be an important driver of lower fertility in the modern world, suggests a new study, as reported by newswise.com. "The areas were we see the greatest declines in fertility are areas with modern labor markets that have intense competition for jobs and an overwhelming diversity of consumer goods available to signal well-being and social status," says senior author Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University. "The fact that many countries today have so much social inequality - which makes status competition more intense - may be an important part of the explanation." Across the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom to India, fertility has gone down as inequality and the cost of achieving social status has gone up. "Our model shows that as competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, pe...

If you are ever thinking of becoming pregnant, you might not want to take the pill. That's because a new study has found that not only does it shrink your ovaries, it also reduces the number of eggs you will have for the rest of your life. According to bioscience.com, the birth control pill significantly affects ovarian reserve— or the number of immature eggs in a woman’s ovaries— which can be a predictor of future fertility. A team in Denmark, who reported this to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting last month, said that two markers for ovarian reserve are markedly suppressed after prolonged birth control pill use, and ovaries are also markedly shrunken after prolonged pill use. “During the last three years we have counseled 900 women, and 300 men, about their ability to conceive naturally,” team leader Kathrine Birch Petersen told Bioscience Technology via email. “The proportion of oral contraceptive users was 28 percent. We we...

Women -- and men, too -- who are hoping to conceive may want to have their cholesterol checked.  A new study says that if a man or woman has high cholesterol levels, it will take longer. Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance found in all cells  of the  body. About a third of American adults – 71 million – have high levels of low-density lipoprotein, or “bad” cholesterol, according to the  Centers for Disease  Control and Prevention, as newswise.com reports. Only one of every three adults with high LDL cholesterol has the condition under control. "In addition to raising the risk of cardiovascular disease, our findings suggest cholesterol may contribute to infertility,” newswise quotes one of the study’s authors, Enrique F. Schisterman, MS, PhD, of the National  Institutes of Health ’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, MD. “Our results suggest prospective parents may want to have thei...

I'm still not convinced but a new study has found that fertility drugs do not lead to breast cancer. Maybe it's just anecdotal but I and quite a few of my friends who have had this kind of treatment have developed breast cancer.  My thought is that it's from all the estrogen we take to try to sustain a pregnancy when we can't do it on our own. Women who took Clomid or gonadotropins as a part of fertility treatment did not experience an increased risk for breast cancer over 30 years of follow-up, compared with women who were not treated with these medication, according to newswise.com. Now I took the more hard-core injectible meds, not the pills you just swallowed, so maybe that's part of it (although   gonadotropins do include some of those meds). An elevated risk for invasive breast cancer was observed for a small number of women who were exposed to 12 or more cycles of clomiphene, who had a little more than 1.5 times the risk of women in the study who ne...

I remember when I was trying to get pregnant being told by everyone that all I had to do was relax.  That alone stressed me out.  Every procedure I failed, I'd tell myself it was because I didn't relax enough.  Really great for the cortisol level. Now it's turning out that stressing out and fertility are linked. Well, infertility.  A new study has found, according to Deborah Netburn at The Los Angles Times, that s tressed out women do have more difficulty getting pregnant than women with less stress, according to a new study.  In fact, 29 percent more, Fox news reports. This, of course, contradicts earlier studies that say they don't! From 2005 to 2009, researchers followed 401 reproductively healthy couples who were trying to get pregnant.  Over a period of 12 months, researchers recorded each couple’s time-to-pregnancy and observed that by five to six months into the study, the couples who had yet to conceive were those with the highest levels of c...

Designer babies.  We've been reading about them lately.  A lab in the U.S. has found a way to take DNA from three different monkeys -- sperm from one, and unfertilized eggs from a young and older female monkey, extracting the DNA from both eggs, inserting the DNA into the younger, fresher egg, and producing a baby that has the genes of the older monkey in the youthful shell of the younger monkey. Sound surreal?  It's already happened with humans in a clinic, according to The New York Times, and Fox News reports that 19 babies have been born this way since 2001.  The idea originally was to allow women with known genetic abnormalities to screen for these birth defects in lab-created embryos to find those without the mutations. Currently something like this can be done through in-vitro fertilization using a method called pre-implant genetic diagnosis (PGD) but it wouldn't help women like me who wanted to have a baby with her own genetics but whose eggs were jus...

Men, contrary to what you may have been hearing, the male chromosome is not destined to disappear. According to Medical News Daily (MND), "The Y chromosome has lost 90 percent of the genes it once shared with the X chromosome, and some scientists have speculated that the Y chromosome will disappear in less than 5 million years," said evolutionary biologist Melissa A. Wilson Sayres, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new analysis. Though some mammals have already lost their Y chromosome, they still have males and females, and reproduce normally, MND reports. And last month, researchers reported shuffling some genes in mice to create Y-less males that could produce normal offspring, leading some commentators to wonder whether the chromosome is superfluous. "Our study demonstrates that the genes that have been maintained, and those that migrated from the X to the Y, a...

Yet one more thing to worry about with adolescent girls.  Though we've always been told otherwise, turns out irregular periods in young girls may be something to worry about. According to newswise.com, "While irregular periods are common among teenage girls, an underlying hormonal disorder may be to blame if this problem persists." The disorder is called polycystic ovarian syndrome (or PCOS), and it's not anything cancer-causing or life-threatening, but it can affect fertility. PCOS is an endocrine disorder that is characterized by an excess of androgens or male hormones in the body. The imbalance of hormones interferes with the growth and release of eggs from the ovaries, which can prevent ovulation and menstruation, newswise.com notes. Menstruation begins, on average, at age 12, and a normal menstrual cycle is usually 28 days.  Experts say that girls should have a regular menstrual cycle within approximately two years after they get their first period ...

Good news!   Infertility rates in this country are dropping!  They've gone from almost 9 percent of women in 1982 to 6 percent of women now. But fertility treatments have also doubled, according to the CDC. According to cbsnews.com, the CDC report found that "6 percent of married women aged 15 to 44, about 1.5 million women, were considered infertile at some point from 2006 through 2010."  But, that's down from 8.5 percent of women (2.4 million) in 1982. "When you look at this downward trend, it goes against the popular wisdom of people we all know," report author Anjani Chandra, a health scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, told USA Today , as noted by cbsnews.com. Age is thought to play a large role in infertility. Among married women without children, 25 percent of those aged 35 to 39 were infertile, as were 30 percent of those 40 to 44 years old. That's compared with between 7.3 percent and 9.1 percent of women under 34 ye...