New Tests for Male Factor, Looking at Quality

We have always had a keen interest in optimizing male factors during treatment with IVF and ICSI.
The key points to this are:
1) assessing quality and quantity first off. It is not jsut count and motility, these are the elast important things to look at, albeit necessary during the evaluation. Looking at quality ahead of time is key. We see often where the count and motility are fine, but the DNA fragmetnation is abnormal or the high resolution morphology (not just your verage morphology--see MSA elsewhere in Blog) is abnormal---these are quality indicators.
2) When there is a male factor (quantity issue, quality issue, or BOTH) then treatment PRIOR to an IVF cycle can be done (email me directly if one wants articles on this pahlering@sherinstitute.com) and there is no doubt that this can improve outcome potential.
3) using the newest techniques in an IVF cycle to select the best ones. There are different ways to do ICSI for example (seee HRSS articels in this blog) AND now we have special techniques that we can use to remove bad sperm ahead of time so we have a pool of better ones to then select from. This is really exciting new stuff. This is not just 'washing the sperm'--that is no longer adequate in todays world of IVF and ICSI.

so the using new ideas to diagnose and manage male factors is criticla to optmizing an IVF cycle. There are new things to be done! Diagnosing problem with proper testing, managing pre-IVF cycle with treatments, and then selecting optimal sperm on 'game day'...these are the pinciple concepts.
Also remember most importantly---just because the basic analysis done shows he is a 'star' with high count...this does not mean the quality is not a factor. Thus one needs to look.