UK study: Marijuana gives you messed-up sperm

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Good news for those of you young dudes out there who love dabs and are not trying to get women pregnant: yet another study shows that marijuana use can alter your sperm production negatively.
Or it might not, nobody really knows for sure actually — including the study authors.


According to Dr. Allan Pacey, researcher in andrology at the University of Sheffield in the UK says that marijuana use may negatively affect the morphology of sperm, lowering the number of viable sperm overall. Basically, he’s saying that pot smoking causes the body of young men to make misshapen little swimmers that never quite hit their intended target.
Of course, the study of 1,970 men was done using a self-reporting survey and researchers made no attempt whatsoever to verify the accuracy of any of the participants involved or to do any sort of actual screenings on them before hand. Of that number, 318 had misshaped sperm up to 96 percent (what they don’t say is that having only 4 percent viable sperm in terms of morphology is also considered borderline normal depending on who you talk to.
According to Pacey, however, the pot is to plane.
“Cannabis smoking was more common in those men who had sperm morphology less than 4%,” Pacey tells CNN. “Cannabis affects one of the processes involved in determining size and shape. And we also know that the way cannabis is metabolized is different in fertile and infertile men.”
But here’s the deal: Maybe it is giving some men a hard time with conception. The real truth is that we don’t exactly know because laws in this country have stifled cannabis science for decades. So the only we have to go on is scare reports and “scientific studies” based on surveys alone. And, generally speaking, all signs kind of point to marijuana being one of hundreds of things (including wearing briefs instead of boxers) that can screw up your little tailed X chromosomes.
So for parents having a hard time conceiving, cutting out things like marijuana, certain foods, exercise and alcohol aren’t that big of a deal in the long run. Also, morphology can improve month-to-month depending on your diet, exercise and dozens of other factors. And finally, it’s not like pot smokers haven’t been reproducing for decades now despite it all.
As Rebecca Sokol of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it:
“The take-home lesson of the article is that clinicians should counsel their patients on the possible relationships between lifestyle factors, abnormal semen parameters and fertility outcomes,” Sokol said. “This should include a discussion that the data are often inconclusive, but the motto ‘everything in moderation’ is a wise approach for the couple who is planning a pregnancy.”

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