It’s the holiday travel season and the new full body scans used for airport security are on everyone’s mind. Aside from issues about civil liberties, are these scans safe? On the internet, you will easily find hysteria based on bad facts, unfounded fears and conspiracy theorists who believe that our government is trying to kill [...]

Remember that great scene in the movie, The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a young man concerned about his future and he receives this memorable advice from one of his parent’s friends, Mr McGuire? “Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word. Ben: Yes sir. Mr. [...]

You may want to buy your dear husband a lap desk for his laptop PC or Mac to protect his sperm from overheating. In a new study published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, use of a laptop computer directly on the lap was associated with scrotal hyperthermia or an elevation of scrotal temperature of [...]

Dr. Martin Keitz and his colleagues at St. Luke’s Hospital and the Columbia College of Physicians presented a retrospective study on the effects of previous chlamydia infection on the chances of conception with IVF at last week’s  annual ASRM meeting. A review of nearly 1300 patients who were tested for chlamydia showed that only 10% [...]

A reader recently asked me how to identify the best egg freezing clinic in the US. Specifically, she wanted to find an ART lab or egg bank that would freeze her own eggs for future use. It turns out that this simple request does not have a simple answer because neither the CDC nor another [...]

The results of a semen analysis can vary from test to test. Sometimes this variation is clinically significant, sometimes it’s not. That’s why most doctors will order at least two semen analyses to corroborate the first result. What is clinical significance? A semen analysis is a estimate of the amount (sperm concentration) of sperm in [...]

You might have seen the recent articles about the first baby born in Hawaii from an egg that was previously vitrified, stored, warmed and  fertilized using ICSI.  Although exciting, especially for the proud parents and perhaps Hawaii, this birth is not the first baby born from a previously frozen egg. You might be surprised to [...]

Yes! Nutrition can affect fertility but there is no magic fertility diet. Assuming that you don’t suffer from celiac disease or polycystic ovarian syndrome which have underlying metabolic disorders to begin with, most of us will optimize our fertility by eating (in moderation) a healthy diet which keeps us somewhere near our ideal weight. Extreme [...]

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) made IVF news last week when Dr Peter Sjoblom, unit manager of Nurture, the Nottingham University IVF clinic at Queen’s Medical Centre (Nottingham, UK), and his colleagues reported that in vitro maturation (IVM)  of human eggs before fertilization resulted in a higher incidence of overweight babies, [...]

Everybody knows someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. The good news is that survival rates are getting better and better. But greater survivorship has shone a light on problems associated with chemotherapies and radiation treatments used to treat cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy can permanently sterilize cancer patients. Why am I telling you about [...]