LAUSR

Address for Correspondence: Dr. Dinesh Kumar. V, Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy, Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences, Puducherry, India. E-Mail: [email protected] Introduction: Male infertility contributes to nearly 30% of the total infertile population worldwide. Despite the advances in diagnostic workup of an infertile male in majority (40-50%) of the cases aetiology is not defined. Supra-physiological levels of ROS impair sperm function by damaging polyunsaturated fatty acid-rich sperm membrane and mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. Materials and Methods: In this study, we performed Chemiluminescence based estimation of Reactive Oxygen Species levels (ROS) in 40 men with idiopathic infertility and 40 age-matched fertile men who served as controls. We had correlated the ROS levels with morphological defects to find out the single best predictor for oxidative stress in sperm. Results and Discussion: In 74.48% infertile men, seminal ROS levels were higher than the critical value (d” 22 RLU/ sec/million). A significant (p<0.05) difference was observed in the number of head defects, mid-piece defects, cytoplasmic droplets and sperm deformity index (SDI) between cases and controls. Conclusion: Supra-physiological ROS levels can impair the sperm function, thus resulting in infertility and excessive ROS generation is mostly by the morphologically abnormal spermatozoa. SDI had significant positive correlation with the ROS levels both in cases (p=0.00) and controls (p=0.001) suggesting it as the best surrogate marker for ROS mediated sperm damage.