Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-6-2026

Identifier

DOI: 10.1210/endocr/bqaf187; PMCID: PMC13017433

Abstract

About 12% of couples worldwide are infertile. Male factor infertility causes or is contributory to a couple's ability to conceive in approximately 50% of cases. Evidence has emerged that infertile men have poor overall health and increased morbidity and mortality, yet the causes for this are poorly understood. Although these men may appear healthy, research shows that they can harbor a wide variety of systemic diseases and illnesses that may share common links with the causes of their infertility. In fact, as semen parameters decline, their risks of several health conditions increase. In the early 1990s to the present, studies revealed that 1% to 6% of unselected infertile men seeking clinical evaluation have significant and (sometimes) life-threatening pathologies ranging from endocrine abnormalities to malignancies, developmental anomalies, and genetic diseases. Yet, despite this knowledge, for couples seeking treatment of their infertility, the female partner undergoes extensive clinical evaluation but the male partner frequently is only asked to provide a specimen for a routine semen analysis. This review focuses on the current understanding of the association of the genetic causes of male infertility and a multitude of diseases that affect these men's overall health and their increased risk of mortality.

Journal Title

Endocrinology

Volume

167

Issue

4

MeSH Keywords

Humans; Male; Infertility, Male

PubMed ID

41486877

Keywords

cancer; health risks; male infertility; spermatogenic failure

Comments

Grants and funding

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Publisher's Link: https://doi.org/10.1210/endocr/bqaf187

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