What sperm parameters effect blastocyst formation and quality during ICSI with severe male infertility

Abstract

Sperm-derived genetic material contributes half of the genome to the embryo, hence it’s crucial to investigate which sperm parameter influences blastocyst formation in the intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles with severe male infertility. The retrospective study analyzed 296 ICSI cycles with severe oligoasthenoteratozoospermia (OAT) and 99 ICSI cycles with preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A). Following the correlation analysis, data stratifications were performed in the OAT ICSI subgroup. The results showed that the matching blastocyst in the OAT ICSI cycles had inferior sperm parameters. DFI and sperm morphology had an influence on the blastocyst formation rate and the high-quality blastocysts formation rate on Day6, but no significant effect on the blastocyst development on Day 5. The high-quality blastocysts formation rate and ratio of high-quality blastocyst on Day 6 were demonstrably better in the subgroup of the teratozoospermic morphology when DFI was within the normal range. In the case of the normal sperm morphology, no statistically significant difference was found in blastocyst development, although there were numerical differences within different DFI subgroups. It was concluded that the blastocyst quality and development declined with the decreased sperm qualities.

Keywords:

• Sperm morphology
• DNA fragmentation index (DFI)
• ICSI
• the blastocyst formation rate
• high-quality blastocyst rate

Ethics approval

The entire procedure was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School (No. 2023-028-02).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

Developed the project concept and designed the study: SW, LC; collected and organized the data: LG; performed the data analysis and interpretation: JW, JF; wrote the manuscript: WJ, LZ. All authors critically reviewed the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for the study.