If your sexual health isn’t what you’d like it to be, your daily habits could be to blame. Things like tobacco, alcohol, and obesity will all decrease your fertility and negatively affect your sexual functioning. Fortunately, there are many simple things you can add to your lifestyle that will get you back on track toward better health. These five foods are a powerful first step. Oysters – A Zinc-Rich Delicacy Oysters have long been identified as an aphrodisiac, but there’s some real science behind how they boost your sexual health. Oysters are rich in zinc which plays an important role in reg ..read more

The use of Clomid to increase testosterone levels has been in practice for many years.  Clomid is the preferred treatment to increase testosterone levels in men who want to maintain fertility options because testosterone replacement products (Testim, Androgel, etc) can decrease sperm production.  Over time, the use of testosterone can shut down sperm production by the testes.  This stoppage can be permanent in some men.  Thus, men who wish to maintain fertility only have a few options. One option for men is to “freeze” (cryopreserve) their sperm before starting testosterone ..read more

Have you heard of Self-Insemination? Self-Insemination is a process where a man will ejaculate at home into a cup and use that sample to draw it up with a syringe to insert into his partner. Whenever it comes out, it’s clumpy and goopy. And then basically there are enzymes that break it up. So, he keeps it basically at body temperature by keeping the sterile cup in his hand. After about 20 to 30 minutes, sometimes a little longer, the enzymes in the ejaculate will break down the sample until it becomes more liquidly. Once it is drawn up with a syringe, either partner can insert it into the vag ..read more

Once considered a taboo topic, infertility is now a mainstream discussion. This is a good thing, because promoting infertility awareness can help those who are struggling with it in several ways. First, people don’t have to suffer in isolation, and there is great hope in regard to the latest treatment options. And when personal stories are shared, there is greater empathy and understanding for those experiencing challenging fertility issues. For cis-gender, heteronormative couples, the stats are clear: between 40-60% of the time, the issue is with a man’s sperm. There are many causes of male i ..read more

One of the things that we do here at Maze Health is an Extended Sperm Search and Microfreeze, also known as ESSM, where we are taking ejaculate and spending 6-8 hours looking through and often finding sperm where no one has found them before and then freezing them in a way where they are easy to find and thaw and use for IVF. We were just featured in the New York Times for an exciting case that we had, where a trans woman had been on hormones for 18 years and no one had been able to find sperm in the ejaculate. The day before she went for her final surgery, a vaginoplasty, and we actually foun ..read more

Two papers recently published in the journal Fertility and Sterility have revealed various disadvantages of increased paternal age on offspring outcomes. Paternal age has increased dramatically in the US over the past 40 years, and the trend seems to be continuing. The average age of paternity has gone from 27.4 to 30.9 years in the last 40 years. In the 1970s, 4% of births were to fathers over the age of 40; today that number is 9%. Also in the 1970’s, one in two hundred births were to fathers over 50; today this number has doubled. Unfortunately, increased paternal age has significant impli ..read more

The Miller School of Medicine at University of Miami is studying what effect, if any, the COVID-19 vaccines might have on sperm. The study’s principal investigator, Ranjith Ramasamy, M.D. is an associate professor and director of reproductive urology. “Based on the mechanism by which mRNA acts, we do not expect the COVID-19 vaccines will have an impact on Male Fertility. But obviously we want data to confirm that hypothesis,” Dr. Ramasamy said. The Miller School is recruiting 60 males between 18 and 50 years old who plan to get a COVID vaccine. Study participants will have a semen analysis pri ..read more

Extended Sperm Search and Microfreeze (ESSM) is a revolutionary procedure that can detect sperm in previously diagnosed azoospermic men. The procedure is non-invasive, painless, and has found sperm in up to 44% of cases. Here’s a break down of the process and equipment we use in our lab to perform this procedure. THE INVERTED MICROSCOPE A standard upright microscope used for semen analysis has a light source below the stage and objectives- the magnifying lenses- above the stage. This is a good setup for looking at slides. An inverted, or live tissue microscope, has the light source above and t ..read more

We’re proud to have just completed a very successful Year 1 of performing Extended Sperm Search and Microfreeze (ESSM) procedures at Maze Health. We have worked with a wide variety of patients this year and are excited to share some of our outcomes. What is ESSM?ESSM is a revolutionary semen evaluation and processing technique that effectively locates and freezes sperm in cases where that was not possible in the past. Where a standard semen analysis is ineffective at detecting a sperm count of less than 200 cells, the extended search process allows us to identify even the presence of a single ..read more

When faced with a cancer diagnosis, sexual health is probably the last thing on your mind. However, with improved technologies for preventing and treating cancer comes a growing body of survivors, as well as urgent questions regarding quality of life post-survival. A recent review in the Journal of Urology (Pizzol et al., 2021) published data on the prevalence of ejaculatory disorder and erectile dysfunction in cancer patients and survivors. They found that sexual dysfunction rates can range from 6.8% to 68.7%, depending on the location of the cancer and the type of treatment used. These rates ..read more