BACKGROUND The Wnt/β- The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is involved in many developmental processes in both fetal and adult life; its abnormalities can lead to disorders including several types of cancers and malfunction of specific cells and tissues in both animals and humans. Its role in reproductive processes has been proven. OBJECTIVE This study was designed to evaluate the expression o...

Testicular sperm retrieval techniques associated with intracytoplasmic sperm injection have changed the field of male infertility treatment and given many azoospermic men the chance to become biological fathers. Despite the current use of testicular sperm extraction, reliable clinical and laboratory prognostic factors of sperm recovery are still absent. The objective of this article was to revi...

Secondary sterility in male patients is due to sperm alterations in a high proportion of cases. But, obstructive azoospermia set up a very important cause of sterility, because a surgical repair is possible. Some of the factors cause obstructive azoospermia are the herniorrhaphy intervention, including secondary inflammatory reaction, and epididymal lesion or epididymitis. Currently, both cases...

BACKGROUND Azoospermia is the medical condition of a man not having any measurable level of sperm in his semen. Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) is a member of the glycoprotein hormone family that plays an important role in human reproduction because of its essential role in normal spermatogenesis. Various Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) have been reported within FSH receptor (FSHR) ge...

Background: MTHFR promoter hypermethylation in testicular biopsies of patients with non-obstructive azoospermia: the role of epigenetics in male infertility. Materials and Methods: DNA from peripheral blood (PB) samples of 50 patients with NOA and 50 fertile men (controls) as well as DNA from testicular biopsies of 32 patients with NOA and five patients with obstructive azoospemia, but normal s...

Azoospermia is defined as the complete absence of spermatozoa upon examination of the semen [including capillary tube centrifugation (CTC), strictly confirmed by the absence of spermatozoa issued in urine after ejaculation]. The presence of rare spermatozoa (<500.000/ml) in seminal fluid after centrifugation is called "cryptozoospermia". The complete absence of spermatozoa should be confirmed w...

The mast cell populations in the human testis were examined using immunohistochemical techniques in five fertile volunteers and 12 patients with obstructive azoospermia, seven patients with idiopathic azoospermia, and 30 patients with varicocele. The number of mast cells per seminiferous tubular section was significantly increased (P < 0.05) in the men with idiopathic azoospermia. In the normal...

Today, with advances in assisted reproductive techniques, many infertile couples are able to have children. However, there is always risk of passing genetic abnormalities associated with infertility from parents to children. Therefore, detection of microdeletions of Y chromosome in patients with spermatogenesis failure seems very important. The purpose of this study was to determine the frequen...

OBJECTIVE Data Mining is a relatively new field of Medical Informatics. The aim of this study was to compare Data Mining diagnosis with clinical diagnosis by applying a Data Miner (DM) to a clinical dataset of infertile men with azoospermia. DESIGN One hundred and forty-seven azoospermic men were clinically classified into four groups: a) obstructive azoospermia (n=63), b) non-obstructive azo...

This paper reports on a patient in whom the clinical diagnosis of obstructive azoospermia was made according to clinical observations, i.e. azoospermia, normal andrological examination, normal follicle stimulating hormone and a misleading histopathological report of a testicular biopsy. Microsurgical vasoepididymostomy failed to restore fertility, and as a last resort, microsurgical sperm aspir...