Over To You: Fathers, Fertility And Females!
Wow, the recent “Think you know how to get pregnant?” and “Why you can’t catch the Corona virus from the vaccination” posts generated so many thoughtful follow up questions from our wonderful Body and Bones community, well, we just had to try and answer at least some of them.
So read on and see if you’ve been wondering about the same things.
There were lots of questions about different stages of our reproductive lives so we’ve put them all together below:
Across the globe, the average age for a first period (menarche) is around 13 years old, but there’s huge variation with healthy girls experiencing menarche anywhere between 9 and 16 years of age. Although genes are definitely important in determining when menarche happens, but getting to a body fat percentage of at least 17% maybe even more significant and in the developed world as we’re getting heavier, younger, this may explain why our daughters are starting their periods earlier.
It seems intuitive doesn’t it that a woman who starts menstruating early might also finish with those periods at a younger age than most, placing pressure on her to get making those babies.
But thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case - huge studies have shown that most women arrive at the menopause at around 51, almost regardless of their age at menarche.
Technically, menopause is not a period of years but the date on the calendar when a woman hasn’t had a period for 12 months, although her likelihood of conceiving naturally probably ended about 6 years before that calendar entry.
Which makes Dawn Brooke rather remarkable - her discovery at age 59 that her suspected cancer was actually a healthy pregnancy put her into the record books as the oldest woman to conceive naturally.
Of course, anyone up on their celebrity gossip knows men can keep on siring children for much longer (Mick Jagger at 73!) and when they can find someone willing to participate with them, men have naturally fathered children into their nineties!
That doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea though– as well as an increased risk of miscarriage in those pregnancies, babies born to older fathers are more likely to suffer any of a number of health issues, from cleft palate to schizophrenia.
Can the various Corona vaccinations affect fertility?
It didn’t take long for “not tested on pregnant women” to morph into “not safe for women wanting to become pregnant”.
For research to prove that these vaccinations don’t affect fertility, we’d need our scientists to do something like this:
· Vaccinate a thousand women who want to get pregnant then compare them with a thousand really similar (age, socio-economic status etc) women who don’t get vaccinated and count up how many get pregnant in each group.
Apart from the months needed to run this experiment, deliberately keeping 1000 women unvaccinated during a deadly pandemic would raise a whole heap of ethical issues.
But without carrying out this kind of unacceptable study, we’re left trying to prove a negative.
And that’s really tricky.
I’m 99.99 % sure that the light goes off in my refrigerator when I close the door,
But I can’t prove it.
That kind of tricky.
If we can’t collect data to prove these vaccines don’t affect fertility, let’s approach this a different way and see what we do know:
· All of the approved vaccines work the same way, teaching our immune system to recognize the distinctive spike protein-covered packaging of the corona virus particles and then destroy those virus packages.
If spike proteins were present on our own cells, fertility problems would be the least of our worries. Our vaccine-activated immune system would destroy any and all of our cells decorated with those spike proteins and the whole vaccination program would be a non-starter.
There’s absolutely no evidence of naturally occurring spike proteins anywhere in our bodies so none on ovarian or testicular cells and none on any developing egg or sperm cells. Consequently, we can be extremely confident there’s no obvious way for vaccinations to affect our well-being or our fertility.
What about the virus itself though, could it affect fertility? Again, let’s start with what we do know:
· Whilst there are no spike proteins on our cells, there are plenty of other proteins covering the surface of our cells, including ACE2 proteins – the ones the Corona virus spike proteins anchor to for the virus to infect us These ACE2 proteins have many crucial jobs in the body and are vital to our health - it’s just our bad luck that Corona virus particles can use them for their own misdeeds!
· In males, testicular cells are covered in ACE2 proteins and so perhaps unsurprisingly, reduced sperm counts have been measured in men infected with the Corona virus.
We don’t know yet how wide-spread and long-lasting this viral effect on sperm count is, however, we do know up to 30% of people still have a variety of symptoms months after their positive COVID-19 test. The balance of scientific evidence therefore, strongly suggests that for men wanting to remain fertile, being vaccinated rather than toughing out the disease, is much the better option!
Unlike with men, there’s no data yet on how COVID-19 might affect female fertility but what about the consequences of catching this virus whilst pregnant?
Again, we’re still learning about COVID-19 in pregnancy so we’ll take a more general look at viruses in pregnancy.
· When pregnant and non-pregnant women are infected with almost any virus, pregnant women are likely to get sicker and more likely to die than non-pregnant women and early data looking at pregnant COVID-19 patients appears to show the same trends.
· The Corona virus responsible for the 2002-3 SARS outbreak increased miscarriages and still births, and infected pregnant women were 3x more likely to end up on a ventilator than non-pregnant, SARS-infected women.
And whilst many viruses don’t usually affect the placenta, some do – with disastrous effects.
· Most South American pregnant women infected with the Zika virus during the 2015 epidemic, didn’t know, they had no symptoms. For many of their babies, however, the story was very different –in Brazil, in just that one year, more than 4000 Zika babies were born with microcephaly (literally “very small head”) and the accompanying impaired brain development.
Can the COVID-19 virus cross the placenta? Quite possibly, there are certainly ACE2 proteins all over placental cells, giving those spike proteins just what they need to do their worst.
As always, I’m not a medical doctor and I’m not giving medical advice but I’m certainly convinced that the risk of the virus causing problems in a pregnancy is much, much greater than the potential for any negative effects of the vaccinations on fertility.
Let’s finish with a fun one:
Those clues like the lank, greasy hair that scream “it’s a girl” or the craving for salty snacks that means that bump is a boy?
I won’t say they’re nonsense but …. there’s no evidence to support any of them!
Except, a few studies have shown that pregnant asthmatic women can find their symptoms increasing when they’re pregnant with a girl. Having a girl rather than a boy on board, seems to poke mom’s immune system and in turn, that irritated immune system causes more asthma symptoms.
Not a disastrous amount and probably not enough to require extra medication but potentially enough to provide a clue.
Or maybe just wait for the ultrasound?!
