Could Sex During Adolescence Affect Fertility in Adulthood?

Can sex during adolescence affect fertility in adulthood? It's a possibility. According to research just released today at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, sexual activity during adolescence can affect males well into adulthood. Included in the varied list of long-term effects are reproductive issues such as "a decrease in accessory reproductive tissue, including the seminal vesicles, vas deferens and epidymis". Although the research is very preliminary, it isn't far-fetched to question how these changes of the male accessory reproductive tissues could impact adult fertility.

The study, conducted by researchers at Ohio State University, demonstrates that both the individual's body and mood mood can sustain lasting effects from sex during adolescence -- presumably because adolescence is a critical period of time for nervous system development.

Study individuals who had sexual activity during the adolescent period of development were found to have:

• increased inflammatory response,
• a decrease in accessory reproductive tissue, including the seminal vesicles, vas deferens and epididymis,
• more signs of depressive-like behaviors,
• lower body mass, and
• changes to cells in the brain including less complexity and shorter dendrites.

"This suggests to us that maybe this process is causing the animals to have a maladaptive response reproductively, as well," [the lead researcher] said.

Because of the legal and ethical issues surrounding sex behavior in children, these experiments were necessarily done with laboratory animals. The researchers chose hamsters as the subjects because they are physiologically similar to humans in several ways important to the study. The findings raise some significant questions which warrant further research (both in animals and in some form, perhaps retrospectively) in other disciplines including human reproduction and sexuality, psychology and endocrinology.


Source: Ohio State University