Health & Medicine - Posted by Phyllis Picklesimer-Illinois on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 16:04 - 2 Comments 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Omega-3 helps sperm get up and go
The body makes DHA from dietary alpha-linolenic acids, the parent compound of the omega-3 fatty acid family. Vegetable oils, including soybean and canola oil, are good sources of alpha-linolenic acid. “In the absence of DHA, male mice are basically infertile, producing few if any misshaped sperm that can’t get where they need to go,” says researcher Manabu Nakamura. (Credit: iStockphoto)
U. ILLINOIS (US)—Omega-3 fatty acids are good for more than heart health. New research shows they may have implications for treating male infertility.
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“In our experiment, we used ‘knockout’ mice that lacked the gene responsible for an enzyme important in making docosahexaenoic acid (DHA),” says Manabu Nakamura, associate professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois.
The body makes DHA from dietary alpha-linolenic acids, the parent compound of the omega-3 fatty acid family. Vegetable oils, including soybean and canola oil, are good sources of alpha-linolenic acid.
“In the absence of DHA, male mice are basically infertile, producing few if any misshaped sperm that can’t get where they need to go.”
“We looked at sperm count, shape, and motility and tested the breeding success rate, and the mice lacking DHA simply were not able to breed,” explains doctoral student Manuel Roqueta-Rivera, who also worked on the study.
In the DHA-deficient knockout mice, sperm counts were extremely low. The sperm that were produced were round instead of elongated and they were unable to move well, he says. But, when DHA was introduced into the diet, fertility was completely restored. “It was very striking. When we fed the mice DHA, all these abnormalities were prevented,” he says. Details of the study appear in the Journal of Lipid Research.
This is the first time that the importance of DHA to male fertility has been shown this directly, although some studies have suggested that male fertility patients with low sperm counts and less motile sperm tend to have low levels of this fatty acid.
The DHA study is part of the Nakamura team’s efforts to understand the function of the omega-3 and -6 fatty acids. As part of that work, they have developed a mouse model to help them understand a particular fat’s physiological role.
By knocking out genes, they can create deficiencies of the fats they are interested in and learn about their functions.
“Knocking out the gene for the delta-6-desaturase enzyme has led to some surprising discoveries, including this one about the importance of DHA in sperm formation and mobility,” he says.
Nakamura’s team plans to continue focusing on this omega-3′s effects on fertility. But he cautions that there are still things they don’t understand.
“We get hints from looking at sperm in the DHA-deficient animals about what type of pathology we may be looking at and why these polyunsaturated fatty acids are important.
“But we’re still at the starting point in understanding the mechanisms that are involved, and we need to do more research at the cellular level,” he says.
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center contributed to the study. It was funded in part by a CONACyT Mexico fellowship award, grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation Fighting Blindness, and Research to Prevent Blindness.
More University of Illinois news: www.aces.uiuc.edu/news/
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2 Comments
Haggus
Ideally, we should be getting all the omega 3 we need to stay healthy from our diets but unfortunately modern diets, with all the process foods and starches we eat, have 20 to 50 times less omega 3 than the ideal amount. That is the reason to supplement with omega 3.
There are basically 2 types of omega 3, from vegetable and animal origin. The omega 3 present in vegetables is in the ALA omega 3 fats form which have to be converted by your body into the EPA and DHA Omega 3 fats. The animal omega 3 fats are already in the EPA and DHA form so they are readily available for assimilation. You only assimilate a 5 – 10% of the omega 3 in the ALA form.
Therefore, it is more efficient to take fish oil, cod liver oil or krill oil than the flaxseeds or chia oils you find in the market.
Make sure you take at least 900 mg of total omega 3 fats per day (EPA plus DHA from the label) to really get the benefits of omega 3.
Read more at http://www.omega-3-fish-oil-wonders.com/fish-oil-benefits.html
Best wishes,
Alfredo E.
What you didn’t mention is that alpha-linolenic acid conversion in the human body isn’t very efficient. Some nine percent for women, and under one percent for males.
http://dhaomega3.org/index.php?category=overview&title=Conversion-of-ALA-to-DHA