Assessment of Post-Thaw Human Sperm Motility for Oligoasthenozoospermic Patients by Comparing Swim-up and Density Gradient Method

Abstract

The separation of motile spermatozoa is essential when clinical Assistive Reproductive Technologies (ART) began a quarter-century ago. As the indications for ART shifted from purely gynaecological to andrological over time, andrological research was compelled to better understand the physiology of male germ cells and develop more sophisticated techniques to distinguish functional spermatozoa from those that are immotile, have poor morphology, or are unable to fertilize the oocyte. Separation strategies based on different principles such as migration, filtration, or density gradient centrifugation evolved initially, starting with the simple washing of spermatozoa. The main purpose of this research is the assessment Of Post Thaw Human Sperm Motility for Oligoasthenozoospermia Patients. For this purpose, the motility of the sperm was calculated using two methods common in sperm preparation in ART – the Swim up and Density Gradient Methods. It was found that in the case of the density gradient method, total motility was 18.5 % with a confidence interval of 12.7 – 24.4. Post-thaw motility was 11.3% with a confidence interval of 6.1-16.5, post-thaw motility after 20 minutes was 6.5% with a CI of 3.1-9.9, and post-thaw motility after 40 minutes was 3.2% with a CI of 0.3 -6.1. Comparatively, in the swim-up method, the total motility % was 18 % with a CI of 11.9 – 24.1, post-thaw motility was 8.3% with a CI of 4.8 – 11.8, post-thaw motility after 20 minutes was 4.3 with a CI of 2.6 – 6.0, and the post-thaw motility after 40 minutes was 2.5% with a CI of 1.1 – 3.9. Though the observations showed that the density gradient method was slightly superior to the swim-up method with regards to the number of processed motile sperms from the preparation, the statistical analysis of our samples showed that there was no real significance between the two methods.