UK has a shortage of quality sperm from donors and this poses problems. Fertility clinics, for one, have to go import semen abroad or settle to using lower quality sperm from local donors.
Allan Pacey, the chair of the British Fertility Society, said that because of the this shortage, fertility clinics in the UK may be forced to accept poorer quality sperm, which could result in women having to undergo more rounds of fertility treatments or more invasive treatments.
"That is a very dangerous road to do down," Pacey said. "That is putting the woman through more procedures, in terms of eggs being collected, than would be done if sperm of higher quality was collected and she could be treated with a simple insemination."
Current guidelines require that sperm donors should be younger than 40 years old as previous studies found that that the quality of sperm declines with age. Sperm from older men are also associated with elevated risks for miscarriage and birth defects.
Findings of a large study to be presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Munich, Germany on Tuesday, July 1, however, suggest that women whose sperm donor is over 40 years old is more likely to get pregnant prompting experts to suggest it could be time to make changes to the current guidelines as doing so would allow older men to donate sperm and alleviate the sperm shortage in the UK.
For the study, Meenakshi Choudhary and Navdeep Ghuman, from the Newcastle Fertility Center, used data from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority to examine nearly 40,000 treatment cycles from 1991 and 2012 and analyze the success rate of sperm donated by men whose age range from below 20 years old to 45 years old.
The researchers found that while a woman's ability to conceive falls with age dropping from 29 percent in women between 18 to 34 years old to just 14 percent in women who were more than 37 years old, the age of the sperm donor had no significant effect on the rate of live birth.
Sperm from older donors whose age was between 41 and 45 years old had slightly increased odds for live birth with 30.4 percent birth rate through IVF technique compared with 28.3 percent when the sperm came from donors below 20 years old.
"It's sperm quality rather than male age that matters," Choudhary said. "Our study shows that we are good at selecting the right sperm donors with the right sperm quality-and that's why we found no difference with the increasing age of sperm donors. It's a reassuring message, which hopefully will encourage more older donors to come forward."
