Attention, chocolate lovers: You may not be able to help yourselves. Swiss and British scientists have linked the widespread love of chocolate to a chemical "signature" that may be programmed into our metabolic systems.
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Sperm retrieval tough after age 35 in some men
"If the diagnosis is Klinefelter's syndrome, testicular sperm extraction should be performed before the critical age of 35 years," Dr. Hiroshi Okada, from Teikyo University School of Medicine in Tokyo, and colleagues write in the journal Fertility and Sterility.
Men with Klinefelter's syndrome have an extra X chromosome. The most common consequence of this syndrome is infertility.
Okada and colleagues attempted to obtain sperm -- to be used in assisted reproduction by intracytoplasmic sperm injection -- from 51 men with Klinefelter's syndrome and azoospermia (the absence of live sperm in semen).
The physicians succeeded in obtaining sperm from testicular tissue in 26 and failed in 25 of the men.
The median age was 31 years in the successful cases and 38 in the failed cases. The rate of successful retrieval was significantly higher in those younger than 35 years of age than in older patients, the physicians report.
SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, December 2005.