The causes and pattern of presentation of male factor infertility as seen at Kenyatta National Hospital.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Infertility is defined as the incapability of attaining a pregnancy after one
year of regular unprotected intercourse. A considerable body of literature on the causes of
female infertility exists, but there is a deficit of data on male factor infertility.
OBJECTIVE: To identify and describe the causes and pattern of presentation of male factor
infertility at Kenyatta National Hospital.
METHODOLOGY: This was a cross sectional study conducted among patients with male
factor infertility that underwent treatment at the Kenyatta National Hospital urological,
gynaecological and the doctor’s plaza clinics. Selection of participants was done in a
nonrandomized consecutive sampling of eligible patients until the desired sample size was
achieved. Informed consent was obtained from all the participants. A structured questionnaire
was administered to the participants who consented to participate in the study. The collected
data was uploaded to a password protected excel sheet for coding and analysis before analysis
using SPSS version 22.0 software. Descriptive statistics for socio demographics such as age
and smoking history were presented as proportions using pie charts and tables.
RESULTS: This study found 60.5% of male factor infertility to be due to unexplained
factors, 31.6% due to varicoceles, 2.6% due to congenital factors and 5.2% due to ejaculatory
duct obstruction. The mean age for the study participants was 34.7 years (standard deviation -
4.8). Most patients did not have clinical risk factors attributed towards male factor infertility.
71.5% of subjects reported a frequency of having sexual intercourse at least once weekly,
26.3% reported having sexual intercourse at least twice a month whereas only 2.6% reported
of having sexual intercourse less than twice a month. Semen analysis was done on all the
subjects who were included in the study. oligozoospermia was found to be the commonest
abnormality at 36.8%, azoospermia at 28.9%, asthenozoospermia at 8% and a combination of
oligozoospermia and asthenozoospermia at 13.2%.
CONCLUSION: Male factor infertility is a common and distressing condition to a patient.
Thus it is important to invest in diagnostic and treatment technologies locally to be able
tackle this disease. Despite some limitations, the study provides a basis for further scientific
research on male factor infertility in our setup.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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