Male fertility test – semen analysis
A semen or sperm test, also known as a semen analysis, is a laboratory test used to evaluate a man's fertility potential by examining the quality and quantity of his semen and sperm cells.
The man should abstain from ejaculation for 3–5 days before providing a semen sample for analysis. This helps to give a clearer picture of his sperm production and fertilization capacity (sperm count and motility).
What Can Be Quickly Assessed in Semen During Analysis?
- Sperm count (concentration): The number of spermatozoa per milliliter of semen.
- Sperm motility and movement categories: This includes fast-progressive, slow-progressive, non-progressive (moving in place), and immotile sperm.
- Sperm morphology: General appearance and structure, including the percentage of normal forms, as well as defects in the head, acrosome, midpiece, tail, and multiple anomalies per sperm (teratozoospermia index).
- Semen volume, color, smell, and pH value (acidity/alkalinity): These parameters provide insight into the function of the male reproductive glands and the condition of the reproductive tract.
- Sperm agglutination: The clumping of sperm and the extent of it, which in some cases may interfere with natural fertilization.
- Sperm membrane integrity: Evaluated using a hypo-osmotic swelling test, where sperm with intact membranes show tail curling, while those with damaged (e.g., dead) membranes remain straight.
- Vital staining for immotile sperm: When a large portion of sperm is non-motile, special staining can determine the proportion of live versus dead sperm. In some cases, immotility may be caused by structural anomalies in the tail or midpiece—often of genetic origin. In assisted reproduction (e.g., ICSI), it is possible to fertilize eggs successfully using live but immotile sperm.
There are 2 different categories for sperm analysis – basic semen analysis and comprehensive semen analysis.
The main difference between the two is, that in basic analysis there are analysed different sperm parameters only from ejaculate, but in comprehensive analysis there are coming in the sperm different functional tests – membrane integrity, presence of antisperm antibodies on the membrane of sperm cells, also morphology and motility after fractionating semen by swim-up method, which selects only motile sperm cells from the ejaculate likewise it happens also by natural conception.
Semen analysis is performed by our biologist Andre Taimalu.
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