One of the most common questions I get from infertile patients is: I want a semen test. After the test, the most common question I am asked is: Is there any sperm? When I answer them truthfully, some of them are shocked because my answer is that there are sperm, but they are basically dead. What? The sperm is dead? It is hard for them to understand why all or a large portion of the sperm ejaculated is dead when they are having a good sex life. When I point to the sperm chart on the lab report and tell them how to identify dead or alive sperm, they often look very confused and do not understand the results. What they see is the sperm test report chart, I sometimes go to the laboratory to see, in the special semen test instrument display, has been magnified twenty times the sperm at a glance, if it is normal live sperm, it will be like a tadpole swimming, while if it is dead sperm, the sperm will not swim, only float, just like we often see on TV after the water pollution of dead fish floating on the surface of the water. This is what I call dead sperm. This means that most, if not all, of the sperm in the semen are dead, and as you can imagine, dead sperm is not fertile. This is one of the main causes of male infertility and can lead directly to sterility. The incidence of male infertility due to dead sperm is reported abroad to be about 1.3%. The rate I encounter in my clinic is almost higher, almost every clinic encounters one or two patients with stillbirth, sometimes even one after another. Why is it that spermatozoa become dead? It should be said that sperm itself has a metabolic function and keeps growing, maturing, dying and absorbing (or discharging) in the human body. In this sense, sperm is an individual with its own life cycle, which is often more than 70 days, and they grow every day but die every day. Therefore, in normal semen, there is a certain amount of dead sperm, but if it exceeds a certain percentage, or even all dead, it means that the life cycle of sperm is greatly reduced, and there must be factors that make sperm die, and the common factors are as follows: 1, lack of certain nutrients necessary for sperm survival in semen, take fructose as an example, fructose is mainly produced by the seminal vesicles, and is a substance necessary for sperm survival and activity, when When there is inflammation in the seminal vesicle gland, the fructose contained in the seminal fluid will be reduced. Infiltration by bacteria and inflammatory cells can also lead to excessive consumption of nutrients and cause deficiency. Abnormalities of trace elements in semen, especially zinc, can also affect sperm vitality and lead to sperm death. 2, semen pH changes, normal semen pH is 7.2 to 7.8, if pH <7 or pH>9 sperm vitality is greatly reduced. The pH is often lower than 7.0 in the case of dead sperm, indicating that the increased acidity of semen may be a factor causing sperm death. In addition, when there is inflammation in the reproductive organs affected by bacterial metabolites and inflammatory secretions, the pH of semen decreases, which can lead to sperm death. 3, insufficient oxygen supply, inflammation of the reproductive organs, especially prostatitis and seminal vesicles inflammatory congestion, edema, as well as local stasis and slowing of blood flow can lead to insufficient local blood supply. The sperm can die due to lack of oxygen when passing through these deformed or inflamed seminal vesicles, prostate and vas deferens. 4. Infections such as Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae. On the one hand, it can reduce or lose sperm vitality, and on the other hand, it can invade the prostate and seminal vesicle glands, making the seminal plasma composition and secretion abnormal and causing sperm death. It can also lead to increased sperm death when semen contains blood or pus cells. I have listed the four causes of spermatozoa death, but in fact for each infertility sufferer, the situation is different, and certainly more than these causes of spermatozoa death, whenever the patient’s laboratory results show spermatozoa death, the patient then want to ask what is the cause? However, for a specific patient, it may be difficult to find a definite cause, which makes many patients suffering from asthenozoospermia very confused. Therefore, after the appearance of a dead sperm, one should not just stop at the level of just laboratory tests of semen, but should also take further tests in order to find out the specific problem as much as possible. The treatment of dead sperm is difficult, especially for some unexplained dead sperm, which sometimes really makes doctors unable to prescribe, and some dead sperm makes assisted reproduction technology also discourage, but in any case, patients with dead sperm still have to carry out exploratory treatment under the guidance of doctors, of course, it is not necessary to go on indefinitely, I always emphasize the need to treat infertility rationally, rational treatment of infertility, if after treatment After a course of treatment there is still no improvement, I recommend giving up.