Men are becoming increasingly less masculine as the years go by. Research is showing that testosterone levels in men have been plummeting for decades. This hormone responsible for masculine behavior is no longer being produced at the rate is used to be produced at. We all know that testosterone levels decrease with age, but the fact is that a 20 year old male today has less testosterone than a 20 year old male 30 years ago. In addition to that, the amount of sperm in semen may also be on the decline.

The male that was once ready to overcome challenges in order to save the princess is now trembling at the thought of having to reach the castle.

Here is a report from CNN Health on the subject.

A 1992 Danish analysis of sperm quality from other studies concluded that sperm quality has been dropping for decades, and a 1997 reanalysis using different mathematical modeling confirmed the decline, estimating a drop in sperm levels of about 1.5% per year in the United States.

But researchers have been gathering new data since 1996, this time using semen from Danish 18-year olds testing for military service.

That data shows no such decline at all. Oddly, the results have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but were instead released early to the Danish government, which then published them online.

If there’s strong evidence that testosterone is dropping, and the jury is still out on the decline of sperm, what other health challenges are men facing?

Male sex organ malformations are certainly among them. Hypospadias for example, a condition in which the man’s urethra opens somewhere before the tip of the penis, nearly doubled in prevalence from 1970 to 1993 according to national Birth Defects Monitoring Program.

Another study found that the percentage of babies in neonatal intensive care units with hypospadias jumped from just .4% in 1987 to 4% in 2000.

Boys also suffer higher rates of once-rare disorders like ADHD and autism. A comprehensive study of South Korean schoolchildren published earlier this year estimates 3.74% of all boys in that country have some form of autism, compared to 1.74% of girls.

To top it all off: there’s evidence that the percentage of babies born male is declining.

In the general population the difference is slight, but statistically relevant. One group of epidemiologists found that in the United States, the percentage of Caucasian babies born male decreased from 51.43% in 1970 to 51.22% in 2002. That’s equivalent to about 21 fewer men per 10,000 births.

In some populations, the drop is far more significant.

A group of Native Americans – the Chippewas of Aamjiwnaang – live on a reserve surrounded by large industrial chemical plants in Ontario, Canada. The percentage of male births there dropped from a normal rate of 55.1% in the years 1989-1993 to just 34.8% in the years 1999-2003.

Why is this happening?

Many researchers cited here mention changes in our environment, like an increase in the number of chemicals we’re exposed to in the womb, and throughout life.

Precisely how it all happens though is somewhat outside our scientific understanding, and of course something like testosterone levels affects each man very differently.

“Two men of the same age may have exactly the same testosterone level but feel very different physically, emotionally, and sexually,” says Ian Kerner, CNN’s sex counselor. “I try to work with men to re-define sex in a way that works with their situation.”

What is clear is that for whatever reason – men are taking some big biological punches from modern life.

Women are significantly more affected by cigarettes than men when it comes to the risk of heart disease, with women 25% more likely to develop coronary heart disease as a result of smoking than male smokers. The research comes from a large meta-analysis published in the Lancet.

Forbes reports:

Rachel Huxley and Mark Woodward analyzed data from 2.4 million participants in studies that adjusted for cardiovascular risk factors and found that the female-to-male relative risk ratio (RRR) of smoking compared to not smoking was 1.25 (CI 1.12-1.39, p<0.0001).For every additional year of followup the researchers found an additional 2% increase in the RRR for women (p=0.03).

The authors speculate that their analysis might have underestimated the true difference in relative risk between the sexes, since in many regions women have only started to smoke in large numbers in recent years. “It will be some years before the full effect of smoking on coronary heart disease risk is known in women,” they write. In addition, women smokers tend to consume fewer cigarettes than men and may be more likely to underreport their smoking habit.

In an accompanying comment, Matthew Steliga and Carolyn Drewsler observe that although in most places more men than women are smokers, more men than women quit smoking and “in some societies the number of female smokers is rising.” Further, they note, “the tobacco industry views women as its growth market.” They conclude that “targeting of both sexes is imperative for smoking prevention and cessation on a global, national, and individual basis.”

Here is the press release from the Lancet:

The increased risk of developing coronary heart disease conferred by smoking is 25% higher for women compared with men

An Article published Online First by The Lancet shows that the increased risk of developing coronary heart disease conferred by smoking is 25% higher for women compared with men. This increased risk for women could, suggest the authors, be due to physiological differences between the sexes, with cigarette smoke toxins possibly having a more potent effect on women. The Article is by Dr Rachel R Huxley, Division of Epidemiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, and Dr Mark Woodward, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

The authors’ meta-analysis included around 4 million individuals and 67000 coronary heart disease events from 86 studies. They found that in 75 cohorts (total 2·4 million participants) that adjusted for cardiovascular risk factors other than coronary heart disease, the pooled adjusted female-to-male relative risk ratio (RRR) of smoking compared with not smoking for coronary heart disease was 1·25 (ie, 25% higher for women). This RRR increased by 2% for every additional year of follow-up, meaning that the longer a woman smokes, the higher her risk of developing CHD becomes compared with a man who has smoked the same length of time.

Despite extreme amounts of funding towards educational programs aimed at preventing the infection of the HIV/AIDS virus, infections have remained around 50,000 a year in the United States for a decade.

The New York Times reports:

The American epidemic is still concentrated primarily in gay men, and is growing rapidly worse among young black gay men.

That realization is causing a rift in the AIDS community. Activists say the persistent H.I.V. infection rate proves that the government prevention policy is a flop. Federal officials are on the defensive even as they concede that the epidemic will grow if prevention does not get better, which they know is unlikely while their budgets are being cut.

And some researchers believe it is impossible to wipe out a fatal, incurable disease when it is transmitted through sex and carries so much stigma that people deny having it and avoid being tested for it.

Looking back, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that new cases peaked at 130,000 a year in the 1980s, sank slowly during the ’90s and reached a plateau at 50,000 around the year 2000.

Larry Kramer, a longtime AIDS activist and the author of “The Normal Heart,” a play about the epidemic’s early days, said: “It means I don’t see an AIDS policy, and I don’t see anyone in charge. It’s so dispiriting that it’s hard to find something to say about it. How many times can you yell ‘Help!’ without ever getting anywhere?”

Both Dr. Kevin Fenton, chief of AIDS prevention for the C.D.C., and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, chief of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, took issue with Mr. Kramer’s interpretation. While both agreed that 50,000 new annual infections was, in Dr. Fauci’s words, “a great concern,” both pointed to some areas where substantial progress had been made. They said that new studies were seeking ways to get more people tested and treated early in the course of the illness, which would make them less infectious and drive transmission rates down.

“The C.D.C. is absolutely not resting,” Dr. Fenton said. “It was a major accomplishment to drop infections from 130,000 to 50,000, and we’re dealing with an epidemic that is dynamic.”

But, he conceded, 50,000 is an “unacceptably high level,” and without better prevention efforts “we’re likely to face an era of rising infection rates.”

Philip Alcabes, a public health epidemiologist at Hunter College in Manhattan, noted that 50,000 is close to the number of Americans who die in road accidents each year — almost 40,000 — “and in some ways, we consider dying on the road an ordinary thing.”

By contrast, he said, nearly one million Americans a year die of heart disease and strokes.

“So it’s not clear that prevention is a failure,” he said. “The average adult’s chances of encountering H.I.V. infection — 0.02 percent a year — are rather low. It’s not reasonable to expect that a sexually transmitted virus will disappear in America, or anywhere else. But I agree with Larry Kramer that there has been a dearth of new policy ideas.”

For most risk groups, infection rates are stable, with 61 percent of cases contracted through gay or bisexual sex, 27 percent through heterosexual sex and 9 percent through drug injections.

In addition to lowering cancer risk and improving overall health, modest weight loss (as low as just 5%) may also give your sexual performance a boost. The study comes from the University of Adelaide.

The Times of India reports:

The men received either a meal replacement-based low-calorie diet or a low-fat, high-protein, reduced-carbohydrate diet prescribed to decrease intake by 600 calories a day.

The results found that a modest weight loss of 5 per cent resulted in a rapid reversal of sexual and urinary problem, within 8 weeks, and the improvement continued out to 12 months in obese men with type 2 diabetes.

“Our findings are consistent with the evidence that not only erectile function, but also lower urinary tract symptoms are a marker of cardio-metabolic risk,” Wittert said.

“The evidence that improvement can be achieved by modest weight loss, in particular when a diet is of high nutritional quality, is of public health significance in framing public health messages that resonate with men,” he added.

The study was published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Men are increasing their life expectancy at a higher rate than women, according to a study released today by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. In addition, the United States ranks behind thirty other countries when it comes to life expectancy, even though it spends the most on health care per capita.

“I think it’s pretty appalling,” Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the institute, told ABC News. “I believe the United States is an exceptional country and we should be leading the world in improvements in health.”

In 2007, life expectancy ranged among individual counties from 65.9 to 81.1 years for men and 73.5 and 86 years for women. Between 1987 and 2007, life expectancy increased nationwide from 71.3 years to 75.6 years for men and from 78.4 to 80.8 years for women. Despite the increase, Americans still lag more than three years behind the 10 longest-living nations, including Japan, Australia, Singapore and Sweden.

Women are not faring as well as men in increasing their life expectancy over time, according to the study.

“You have to realize that the gaps between smoking between men and women have gone away,” Murray told ABC News. “The women are now, relative to men, smoking more. The obesity epidemic in women is greater than in men and in fact, progress in tackling blood pressures much worse in women than compared to men.”

Dr. James Fang, a cardiologist at University Hospitals’ Case Medical Center in Cleveland, is not surprised by the findings contained in the study.

“Women somehow still don’t understand that they will be affected by heart disease … [it's] not on the radar screen,” he told ABC News. “The health care profession may be guilty. We hammer [it] home for men [but are] not as aggressive for women.”

Donna Bentley, his 62-year-old cardiac disease patient, is well educated and works hard on her risk factors.

“I do believe women put themselves last, especially if they have families. They need to think about what to eat, when to eat and [be strict about] exercise,” she said to ABC News.

Dr. Fang said he believes there may also be another factor.

“Women are more stoic … they have a higher pain threshold than men. They don’t usually say they are in pain.” And therefore, may not be seeking treatment at the same rate as men.

In addition, ABC News found startling contrasts in life expectancy within the United States. In Virginia’s Fairfax County, the average man lives to be 81 years old. However, in Mississippi’s Holmes County a male usually only reaches the age of 65.

Women in Collier County, Florida have 12 years on those in Holmes County.

Even more surprising, some neighboring counties have wide differences. In Yuma County, Arizona the average life expectancy increased eight and a half years for men during the study’s time period, but in neighboring La Paz County, it dropped by a year.

“When we look at both the trends in life expectancy and at what is happening in each county for the key drivers of life expectancy, we think that tobacco, the obesity epidemic and high levels of blood pressure are a key part of the explanation,” said Murray.

A study of 1,455 U.S. men diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer has found a link between brisk walking and lowered risk of prostate cancer progression, according to scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and the Harvard School of Public Health.A study of 1,455 U.S. men diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer has found a link between brisk walking and lowered risk of prostate cancer progression, according to scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The scientists found that men who walked briskly — at least three miles per hour — for at least three hours per week after diagnosis were nearly 60 percent less likely to develop biochemical markers of cancer recurrence or need a second round of treatment for prostate cancer.

“The important point was the intensity of the activity — the walking had to be brisk for men to experience a benefit,” said Erin Richman, ScD, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF who is the first author on the study, published in the journal Cancer Research. “Our results provide men with prostate cancer something they can do to improve their prognosis.”

An earlier study, published earlier this year by UCSF’s June Chan, ScD, and collaborators at the Harvard School of Public Health, showed that physical activity after diagnosis could reduce disease-related mortality in a distinct population of men with prostate cancer. The new study complements this finding, as it was the first to focus on the effect of physical activity after diagnosis on early indications of disease progression, such as a rise in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood levels.

“Our work suggests that vigorous physical activity or brisk walking can have a benefit at the earlier stages of the disease,” said Chan, the Steven and Christine Burd-Safeway Distinguished Professor at UCSF and senior author of both studies.

Common Form Of Cancer Among Men

After skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed type of cancer among men in the United States, and more than 217,000 U.S. men are diagnosed with the disease every year according to the National Cancer Institute. Last year alone 32,050 men died from the disease.

Vigorous exercise and brisk walking have been consistently shown to have significant benefits on cardiovascular health, diabetes, and many other diseases. Previous studies have also shown the benefit of regular physical activity for disease outcomes in breast and colon cancer, but this is one of the first studies to demonstrate such a benefit for men with prostate cancer.

The participants in this study were selected were a subset of a larger group of 14,000 men with prostate cancer who are enrolled in a long-term, nationwide prostate cancer registry study known as the Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor (CaPSURE™), led by Peter Carroll, MD, MPH, who is the chair of the Urology Department at UCSF and an author of the study.

A particular strength of this study is the focus on early recurrence of prostate cancer, which occurs before men may experience painful symptoms of prostate cancer metastases, a frequent cause for men to decrease their usual physical activity. Additionally, the researchers reported that the benefit of physical activity was independent of the participants’ age at diagnosis, type of treatment and clinical features of their disease at diagnosis.

Asked whether she would recommend walking for all men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer, Dr. Chan said yes — but emphasized that the walking must be brisk.

“Our results suggest that it is important to engage in exercise that gets your heart rate up a little bit,” she advised.

The article, “Physical activity after diagnosis and risk of prostate cancer progression: data from the Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor” is authored by Erin L. Richman, Stacey A. Kenfield, Meir J. Stampfer, Alan Paciorek, Peter R. Carroll and June M. Chan.

This work was funded by the Department of Defense, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Abbott Labs, and through a National Institutes of Health training grant.

A new study has uncovered information that may be alarming to laptop users. Using your laptop on your lap, as the product is designed to be used, can lead to scrotal damage within 10 to 15 minutes. The study, published in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility, measured the heating effects of laptops on 29 men.

Researchers used temperature sensors on the scrotums of the 29 men, then placed the laptop computers on their laps. It did not take long for the temperature to rise to levels that are known to damage sperm production. After 10 to 15 minutes of laptop use, the damage was observed. This is alarming, as countless laptop users often place the laptop on their laps for hours at a time.

When testicles heat up too much, sperm production suffers. Optimally, they should remain a degree or two below body temperature. This is especially important if you are trying to conceive a child. Laptop use heats up testes at a rate of 2.5 Celsius per hour. This means that hours of daily use can really start wreaking havoc on the testicles, and inhibit sperm production to a very large degree.

Yelim Sheynkin, a urologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led the study. He was concerned about the millions of laptop users worldwide, and highlighted the fact that it is hard to notice the temperature change during laptop use.

“Millions and millions of men are using laptops now, especially those in the reproductive age range,” he said.

“Within 10 or 15 minutes their scrotal temperature is already above what we consider safe, but they don’t feel it.”

Even laptop cooling pads didn’t help, the study found. The biggest factor was, surprisingly, your leg position. Computing while widely spreading your legs was found to dissipate heat most efficiently, but it would be wise to simply use a table or other hard surface instead of subjecting your genitals to damage.

It is a shame that another fertility-killer has been identified, especially after the findings that bisphenol a (BPA) was a danger to reproductive health. Now that the conclusions of this study have hit the mainstream news, laptop manufacturers will be forced to answer to their customers. If enough consumers voice their frustration with these companies, changes will certainly be made.