Fertility for Longevity
‘Understanding how fertility occurs in the brain and body will allow you to maximise your vitality and longevity’.
This statement from Andrew Huberman, professor and researcher at Stanford University, sounds big: perhaps you’re not at the stage of considering having children and have no concept of how your ‘fertility status’ is. Maybe you’re interested in leading a generally healthy lifestyle, you go to the gym, take your vitamins, get your fresh air and avoid being a regular at McDonalds. So why should you think about fertility now? What does your fertility tell us about your health?
There have been plenty of studies over the past decade which show strong correlations between male fertility - measured using semen analysis parameters of sperm concentration, seminal volume, and motility - and prevalence of other preventable diseases (also known as comorbidities). These comorbidities include obesity, hyperlipidaemia (high blood fat levels), diabetes and high blood pressure. There is also an abundance of research regarding female fertility - measured by ovulatory function and hormone patterns - and overall health.
From these studies, we can understand lifestyle factors that help keep us healthy and fertile, such as regular exercise, avoiding excess saturated fat intake, having a generally healthy diet, minimising alcohol and stopping smoking.
‘Semen quality and male infertility may be fundamental biomarkers of overall health and could serve as harbingers for the development of comorbidity and mortality.’
We know all of these factors affect our fertility. But why does this all matter if you're not trying to have a baby? Because subfertility is not exclusively caused by dysfunction of the reproductive system, but that in fact a whole host of other factors play a role. Therefore if there is a problem with fertility, there are likely several body systems involved. Perhaps finding out that your sperm is not tip top (or your hormone regulation is out of whack) could point you in the direction of other health tests, which in turn reveal what changes you could make to keep you healthier for longer. It is likely beneficial to overall health, vitality and longevity to combat these factors. Since one of the primary biological goals of humans is to reproduce, if we are unable, we must question - what else is going on? And this begs the question, should we be monitoring our fertility PRIOR to trying to get pregnant to give us a measure of our overall health? And what about after having had children, could monitoring fertility still be useful?
There are many questions like this which are unanswered or inconclusive in fertility research. But we have confidence that the broadening scope of science in these areas will shed more light on how fertility and long-term health are linked.
References:
doi: 10.21037/tau.2019.08.35
doi: 10.5534/wjmh.2017.35.2.59.
doi: 10.1300/j013v44
doi: 10.1186/1477-7827-11-66
doi: 10.3389/fphar.2022.895044