Monday, July 8, 2013

IMSI vs. ICSI: Myth busted!



It is widely believed that IMSI used in IVF is a better technique than ICSI though this claim is yet to be backed by rational evidence.

The smallest cell in the human body; a sperm from the male and the largest; an egg from the female, unite to fuse their genetic material together and create a new being.  There are approximately 20 – 150 million sperms in a normal human semen ejaculate, often with dissimilar appearances. Diversely structures and shapes of human sperms clearly stand out against most animal sperms which are perfectly shaped. At Malpani fertility clinic, to examine a sperm sample we stain the sperms and observe them under a microscope at high magnification to study their shapes. Researchers investigating male fertility were particularly curious to know whether the sperm’s shape would affect male fertility, leading to several studies intending to find out what a normal human sperm actually looked like.

Animals have identical looking sperms which makes it easy to distinguish abnormally shaped sperms. But reviews of several studies suggest that sperms in a human semen sample have a wide range of variability in their morphology, in a single ejaculate, several ejaculates from the same fertile male and those from other fertile males. It is, therefore, difficult to define the normal morphology of human sperm. With such high variability in the shape of the human sperm even from fertile males it is hard to comment on which sperm is abnormally shaped and which is not. Thus, sperm morphology cannot be used to gauge the fertility potential of men. To know how this impacts the debate of IMSI vs. ICSI read http://blog.drmalpani.com/2012/12/is-imsi-better-than-icsi.html

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