Wednesday, March 05, 2008 Literatus: Oral options By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T. Breakthroughs
“BEING pregnant,” observed Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom and Ireland, “is an occupational hazard of being a wife.”
That was before her death in 1901. Had she been around today, she would have noticed that pregnancy also has become a concern of modern man, a serious trend that has since brokered the dawn of male hormone contraception.
The science of male oral contraception has attracted so much attention that nowadays, treatment combinations can inhibit sperm production to azoospermia (no sperm at all per ejaculate) or near-azoospermia (not more than one million sperm cells per milliliter of semen).
Studies between 2002 and 2006 have documented that androgen or androgen-progestin treatment combination can do so reliably. First discovered in 1936, androgen is a general term referring to a steroid hormone that modulates the development and maintenance of masculine characteristics in men, including the activity of the accessory male sex organs and development of male secondary sex characteristics.
Progestin is a synthetic form of progesterone, a steroid hormone involved in the female menstrual cycle and pregnancy. The first orally active progestin was ethisterone, synthesized in 1938 by Hans Herloff Inhoffen, Willy Logemann, Walter Hohlweg and Arthur Serini at Schering AG in Berlin, Germany.
This degree of sperm suppression provides effective contraception with an efficacy rate of 97 to 100 percent. The good news is: sperm production returns to normal after stopping the treatment in all men studied.
A recent subject-based, re-analysis study (headed by Peter Y. Liu) of 1,756 men identified from 30 studies showed that oral contraception can bring down sperm count below one million per ml after an estimated time of 2.73 months. The study subjects were predominantly Caucasion (two-thirds) and independently of Asian (one-third). Liu led a team of 18 investigators coming from Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, Switzerland and The Netherlands. Results were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (Feb. 26).
Next week, we will discuss the findings of the study.
Meanwhile, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, gave us a hint on "the why" of male interest in contraception: “The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.” The assumption here is that men are giving some thought into it: be it mating or artificial means of limiting reporduction.
