Deterioration of semen quality and sperm‐DNA integrity as influenced by cigarette smoking in fertile and infertile human male smokers—A prospective study

Abstract

In modernized lifestyle smoking is one of the trendy, psychological, and socioeconomic scenarios of young adolescents mainly in the age of the reproductive stage. Based on a number of cigarettes smoked, age, and duration of the smoke, the study aims to search for the profound effects of smoking and its impact on semen parameters, sperm-DNA integrity, and fragmentation of sperm DNA with cotinine and apoptotic caspase-3 marker in the seminal plasma of fertile and infertile smokers. To determine oxidative damage by 8-hydroxy deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) from isolated sperm DNA (steps: reactive oxygen species washing by nitro blue tetrazolium (NBT), sperm lysis, salt digestion, ethanol washing, and finally with high-performance liquid chromatography analysis). Level of DNA fragmentation (percentage) in native and intact DNA, the activity of caspase-3 in infertile smokers will be compared with the control group of nonsmokers. Also, the sperm viability was visualized by eosin-nigrosin and aniline blue staining. Cotinine is one of the best markers of smoking. The cotinine level (2224.24 ± 1.19 *** ng/mL), when abundant it negative correlates with morphology and rapid motility in infertile smokers than nonsmokers. Gel preprogram measured the sperm integrity and was found to be less in smokers than nonsmokers. The spermatic oxidative marker 8-OHdG was high and gave an R 2 value of 0.9104 with morphology and 0.9007 for rapid motility of infertile sperm, respectively. Infertile smoking subjects (<10 cigarettes/day) had significant changes increase in sperm fragmentation, caspase-3, and cotinine while negative impact with motility, morphology, and pH of semen compared with fertile, infertile nonsmoking subjects. K E Y W O R D S 8-hydroxy deoxyguanosine, caspase-3, nicotine, sperm-DNA fragmentation

Sperm DNA fragmentation testing: Summary evidence and clinical practice recommendations

“…Among lifestyle factors, tobacco smoking has an adverse influence on sperm chromatin integrity (Aboulmaouahib et al, 2018;Boeri et al, 2019;Cui et al, 2016;Fraga et al, 1996;Gunes et al, 2018;Kumar et al, 2015;Mostafa et al, 2018;Ranganathan et al, 2019;Sharma, Harlev, et al, 2016). Cannabis consumption can also impair sperm DNA quality (Verhaeghe et al, 2020).…”

Sperm DNA Fragmentation: A New Guideline for Clinicians

“…Various studies have been conducted linking several lifestyle factors/environmental exposures to elevated levels of SDF [78,94,[189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196][197][198]. These factors include (i) Physical agents such as radiation and heat; (ii) Chemical agents such as cigarette smoke, airborne pollutants, and chemotherapeutic drugs; and (iii) Biological factors including sexually transmitted infections, increasing male age, elevated body mass index (BMI) and medical conditions such as insulin dependent diabetes [78,94,[189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196][197][199][200][201]. Elevated OS levels is believed to be the main mechanism resulting in SDF with these exposures.…”

“…Exposure to environmental and lifestyle factors have far-reaching implications on male fertility. Current data has consistently associated smoking with higher SDF values when compared to non-smokers [91,99,191,215], however no study has yet evaluated the impact of smoking cessation on SDF. There have also been numerous environmental factors such as airborne pollutants, ionizing radiation, and pesticides linked with increased SDF values [74,82,193,216,217].…”

Investigating the Role of the microRNA-34/449 Family in Male Infertility: A Critical Analysis and Review of the Literature

“…In the study of Najafipour and colleagues it was suggested that smoking can increase the methylation status of the miR-449 cluster's promoter (84). Other researchers have similarly associated smoking with aberrant methylation patterns in several genes as well as with abnormal semen parameters, indicating the detrimental epigenetic effect of smoking on male fertility (89)(90)(91). Evidence suggests that several other lifestyle parameters, physical activity levels, stress as well as aging are described as factors that could affect DNA methylome in spermatozoa, leading to abnormal methylation patterns in specific genome loci, including the miR-34/449 loci, eventually leading to structural and functional abnormalities of spermatozoa (86).…”