Male Patient Workup

In 60 percent of infertile couples, the male is either fully or partially responsible for the inability to conceive.

DR. HADDAD: Working up the male partner for infertility is usually pretty straight forward. It’s a simple, inexpensive test called the semen analysis where we collect an ejaculate from the male partner and we’ll look at different variables. Some of the variables we look when evaluating a semen analysis are the volume of the ejaculate, the concentration of sperms in the ejaculate, the motility of the sperms which is the percentage of sperms that are moving, because sperms that don’t move cannot swim up the female reproductive tract and, therefore, cannot fertilize an egg, and the morphology of the sperm. Morphology means the shape. That’s probably one of the variables of a semen analysis that is most commonly overlooked while evaluating the male patient.