Danish scientists led by Lærke Priskorn from the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet studied the results of sperm analysis of 78,284 men aged 18 to 65 and found that the higher the sperm quality, the longer the life expectancy. All men between 1963 and 2015 were referred for the study by a urologist or gynecologist conducting sperm quality screening before participating in an in vitro fertilization program (i.e., some samples were obtained from healthy men). The results were published in the journal Human Reproduction.
Over the 23 years of follow-up, 8,600 men (11 percent) died. Life expectancy calculations showed that men with more than 120 million motile sperm per milliliter had an average life expectancy of 80.3 years, 2.7 years longer than men with zero to five million motile sperm (77.6 years). The researchers also adjusted for the participants' education and medical history to estimate premature mortality in men from all causes. And in this case, those with sperm counts of more than 120 million were in the most advantageous position: compared to them, in the 80-120 million group, the risk of death increased by 19 percent, 40-80 million by 16 percent, 10-40 million by 27 percent, 5-10 million by 38 percent, from zero to five million by 61 percent, and in men with azoospermia, the probability of death was 39 percent higher. That is, this dependence can be traced even in the category of healthy men with normozoospermia (more than 20 million sperm per milliliter). The data obtained confirm that male reproductive function is a biomarker of long-term survival.