A number of culture-dependent and -independent studies have reported that the number and significance of bacterial species in semen may have been underestimated. The aim of the present study was to profile the seminal microbiome in patients with obstructive or non-obstructive azoospermia. A high-throughput sequencing method was adopted to sequence genomic DNA extracted from the semen of healthy...

OBJECTIVE Aproximately 10% of patients with non-obstructive azoospermia and 5% with non-obstructive severe oligozoospermia carry AZF region microdeletions (AZoospermic Factor) in the Y chromosome. The aim of this study is to analize the clinical and pathological findings in this group of patients and compare them with the previous evidence. MATERIAL AND METHODS Retrospective study of 11 patie...

A genome-wide association study of Han Chinese subjects was conducted to identify genetic susceptibility loci for nonobstructive azoospermia (NOA). In the discovery stage, 802 azoospermia cases and 1,863 controls were screened for genetic variants in the genome. Promising SNPs were subsequently confirmed in two independent sets of subjects: 818 azoospermia cases and 1,755 controls from northern...

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...

Secretory azoospermia is a severe form of male infertility caused by unknown factors. DAX-1 is predominantly expressed in mammalian reproductive tissues and plays an important role in spermatogenesis because Dax-1 knockout male mice show spermatogenesis defects. To examine whether DAX-1 is involved in the pathogenesis of secretory azoospermia in humans, we sequenced all of the exons of DAX-1 in...

BACKGROUND Interest in radiation-related health problems has been growing with the increase in the number of workers in radiation-related jobs. Although an occupational level of radiation exposure would not likely cause azoospermia, several studies have reported the relation between radiation exposure and azoospermia after accidental or therapeutic radiation exposure. We describe a case of azoo...

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...

Male infertility is considered a common health problem, and non-obstructive azoospermia with unclear pathogenesis is one of the most challenging tasks for clinicians. The objective of this study was to investigate the differential serum metabolic pattern in non-obstructive azoospermic men and to determine potential biomarkers related to spermatogenic dysfunction. Serum samples from patients wit...