from PART II - INFERTILITY EVALUATION AND TREATMENT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
INTRODUCTION
For over twenty-five years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has served to provide a standardized approach to the assessment of the fertility potential of semen sample. These standards are concerned with measurable parameters such as the physical properties of an ejaculate, estimating the count of its cellular content be it sperm or leukocytes, grading sperm morphology and motility, and examining a possible immune interaction between sperm and the content of seminal plasma or the preovulatory mucus produced by the uterine cervix. The adoption of these standards worldwide has been enhanced through local schemes of quality control measures leading to andrology laboratory accreditation and certification. The first andrology laboratory manual published by the WHO in 1981 was the culmination of clinical experience and research in the previous eighty years (1). In its successive editions, the WHO manual portrayed stricter criteria in assessing parameters of interest and as a result values that were thought to be compatible with normal male fertility were modified (2,3). The resounding success of the WHO criteria is met by call for further scrutiny of sperm quality to address numerous concerns born from clinical and research work carried out in more recent years. First, the results of semen analyses can be very subjective and prone to intra- and interobserver variability (4). Second, although the traditional, manual-visual light microscopic methods for evaluating semen quality maintain their central role in assessment of male fertility potential, often a definitive diagnosis of male fertility cannot be made as a result of basic semen analysis (5).
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