Male fertility and the need for more research

Just over nine years ago in January 2010, the British Fertility Society held its 2010 annual meeting at the Marriott Royal Hotel in Bristol (UK) with the theme of ‘Recent Advances in Male Fertility’. It was a memorable meeting in many respects; in part because of several inches of snow that fell across the country which hampered the arrival (and departure) of speakers and delegates, and also because many of the speakers agreed to submit manuscripts to Human Fertility so that a special (male fertility) issue could be published.

The resulting special issue entitled ‘Andrology in 2010’ (Pacey, 2010b) appeared later the same year in issue 4 of volume 13 of the journal. It contained fifteen review articles of both presentations made at the meeting, as well as others that were subsequently commissioned. These remain some of the most highly cited articles that Human Fertility has ever published. For example, at the time of writing this editorial, the articles by Pembrey (2010) on ‘Male-line transgenerational responses in humans’ and Agarwal and Sekhon (2010) on ‘The role of antioxidant therapy in the treatment of male infertility’, have been cited over 75 times each (according to Web of Science). Moreover, I am proud to say that my own contribution to that issue ‘Environmental and lifestyle factors associated with sperm DNA damage’ (Pacey, 2010a) continues to be well cited even today. Whilst the popularity of these articles serves on the one hand to illustrate the medical and scientific interest in male fertility as a whole, they could also serve as a reminder of how little we still know.

I highlighted the rather neglected state of research into male fertility in a column for the BBC back in 2009 (Pacey, 2009). Ten years later, I cannot say that much has changed. However, in recent months I have been involved in several strategy meetings organized by various bodies trying to develop a global and coordinated approach to research into male fertility. This has been reinvigorated largely on the back of a thought-provoking article by Barratt, De Jonge, and Sharpe (2018) published in Human Reproduction again outlining the sorry state of our knowledge in this area. Over the years we have played our part through the pages of Human Fertility in trying to publish good studies about male fertility, but it is clear that we need to do much more.

Therefore, as I outlined in my editorial earlier this year (Pacey, 2019), we devote this issue of Human Fertility entirely to andrology. We present one review article by Boniewska-Bernacka, Pańczyszyn, and Cybulska (2019) about the role of telomeres in male infertility, in addition to 9 original articles on a variety of topics. As always, I hope you enjoy reading them and I hope in some small way they are able to advance our knowledge base in this area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.