Men with high-quality sperm have better life expectancy, study says

Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.

- Ian Sample

Danish scientists analysed samples from about 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120m swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5m.

The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers stated in the journal Human Reproduction.

"It really seems to be that the better the semen quality, the longer the survival," said Dr Lærke Priskorn, an epidemiologist at Copenhagen university hospital, who led the study with Dr Niels Jørgensen, an andrologist at the hospital.

The finding implies that semen quality reflects a man's broader health and how likely he is to succumb to medical conditions later in life. On every measure of sperm quality the researchers checked, poorer quality was linked to earlier death.