Today (March 26) a media report said that sex hormone levels provide the first clinical evidence that the new coronavirus affects the male gonads. This clinical evidence comes from a paper recently uploaded on a website by Zhang Ming, an associate professor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Wuhan University’s Zhongnan Hospital, and others, which lists basic data on 81 male patients with the new coronavirus. In response to the Xinjing News, Zhongnan Hospital said that there is no definite conclusion on the study of the effect of the new crown virus on male reproductive function, the paper was not published, and Associate Professor Zhang Ming is still in the research stage. Recently, Zhang Ming, an associate professor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Central South Hospital of Wuhan University, and others uploaded a paper on the MedRxiv platform entitled “A single-center study of the effect of new crown infection upon male gonadal function” (Effect of SARS-CoV-2 infection upon male gonadal function: A single center -based study). The MedRxiv website is a free, non-profit service operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, BMJ, and Yale University for publishing complete but unpublished research manuscripts, i.e., articles that are not peer-reviewed before they are published online. A media report shows that Zhang Ming’s team at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Wuhan University’s Zhongnan Hospital conducted a retrospective study of serum samples from 81 male patients with new coronary pneumonia. These patients were admitted to Wuhan Leishenshan Hospital between March 5 and March 18 and ranged in age from 20 to 54 years old. After comparing 81 newly crowned patients with 100 healthy men of similar age, Zhang Ming’s team found that the former had significantly higher serum luteinizing hormone (LH) and prolactin levels, while the ratio of testosterone to follicle-stimulating hormone relative to LH was significantly lower. LH is a glycoprotein-like gonadotropin secreted by adenohypophyseal cells that promotes the conversion of cholesterol into sex hormones in gonadal cells. The authors of the paper concluded that although semen parameters are the direct reflection of gonadal function, the alterations in the above indicators also provide the first indirect clinical evidence of testicular function attack by neocoronavirus. In response to the above study, the publicity department of Wuhan University Central South Hospital responded to Xinjing News that this research project by Associate Professor Zhang Ming does exist and that the relevant paper has not yet been published and is still in the research phase. “The effect of the new coronavirus on male reproductive function is only a research direction, and the research results have not yet taken shape. The current study is partially supported by data, but there is not yet a large amount of data to support it.” Content source: Xinjing News