Hum. Reprod. Advance Access published online on March 28, 2007
Human Reproduction, doi:10.1093/humrep/dem092
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Could hormone residues be involved?
Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, 105 Lefevre Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
1 Tel: +1-573-882-4367; Fax: +1-573-884-5020; E-mail: vomsaalf@missouri.edu
Key words: semen quality/hormone residues in meat/male infertility/environmental factors
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this issue, Swan et al. report finding a relationship between the amount of beef consumed by women during pregnancy and subsequent sperm concentration in their sons in adulthood. There is extensive evidence that maternal nutrition and maternal consumption of specific nutrients, drugs and chemicals present in food during pregnancy and lactation can have consequences for subsequent pathophysiology of offspring. This has been demonstrated experimentally in animals, and the developmental origins of human health and disease (DoHAD) hypothesis also has considerable support from the epidemiological literature (Fowden et al., 2006
; Gluckman et al., 2007
).
Only recently have researchers interested in fetal nutrition and metabolic diseases become aware of findings relating developmental exposure to the class of environmental chemicals known as endocrine disruptors to metabolic and reproductive disorders in males. Specifically, Skakkebaek et al. (2001) have identified that a cluster of reproductive abnormalities in males (sperm quality