Danish scientists led by Lærke Priskorn from Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet studied the semen analysis results of 78,284 men aged 18 to 65 and found that higher sperm quality was associated with a longer life expectancy. All men were referred for testing between 1963 and 2015 by a urologist or gynecologist who performed sperm quality screening before participating in an in vitro fertilization program (meaning some of the 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. In this case, those with sperm counts of over 120 million were in the most advantageous position: compared to those with 80-120 million sperm, the risk of death increased by 19 percent; those with 40-80 million sperm counts by 16 percent; those with 10-40 million sperm counts by 27 percent; those with 5-10 million sperm counts by 38 percent; those with 0-5 million sperm counts by 61 percent; and those with azoospermia had a 39 percent higher risk of death. This correlation is evident even in the category of healthy men with normozoospermia (more than 20 million sperm per milliliter). The findings confirm that male reproductive function is a biomarker of long-term survival.
