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Male infertility linked to testicular cancer

Updated: 2009-06-08 22:38:13 CST Category: Infertility Testing-Male

by Laurent Castellucci

Researchers have found that infertile men are 2.8 times more likely to develop testicular cancer than those men who were fertile. The report appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Dr Thomas Walsh and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco said they do not think that infertility treatments cause testicular cancer.

"A more plausible explanation is that a common exposure underlies infertility and testicular cancer," they write, adding that prior work links certain severe forms of male infertility with faulty DNA repair which is also associated with tumor development. An interplay between genetic and environmental factors is more likely, according to them.

The researchers studied 22,000 men in California, making it the largest study of its kind in the U.S. Previous studies in Europe have had similar results.

The researchers note that during the last 30 to 50 years, the increase in testicular cancer has gone up in industrialized nations, as has the incidence of virtually all cancers. At the same time, there has been an increase in male infertility in these nations.

"It is unclear whether these two trends are independent or related to one another," they write.

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