Choosing to have a child together can be a wonderful experience for you as a couple, but trouble conceiving can cause your relationship wellness, and personal sense of wellbeing, to suffer. However, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Utah, this may not be a problem if you take vitamins in conjunction with your fertility treatments.
Jeff and Lauren Wall, a married couple from Salt Lake City, Utah, are now expecting twins, but getting to this point was not smooth-sailing. The couple had trouble conceiving, and at times had to travel an hour for a four-minute consultation with a fertility specialist. According to Jeff, ‘That was discouraging because that was two hours out of my day without providing any answers. We expected results after several months of trying but the doctors that we saw told us to keep trying and that everything would be OK.’
Lauren added, ‘Sometimes there aren’t answers for why you have trouble.’ So the couple became participants in a fertility study at the University of Utah Health Care. Fortunately, study author Dr. Ahmad O. Hammoud, medical director at the Utah Centre for Reproductive Medicine at the University of Utah Health Care, had a good idea why the couple was having trouble conceiving a child. His research shows that there’s a direct correlation between diet, pollution and male infertility.
‘There are a lot of molecules in the environment that can affect negatively male fertility through damaging the genetics of the sperm,’ explained Dr Hammoud, a doctor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Utah. ‘Vitamins can have a strong antioxidant effect. They can have a positive effect on rebuilding material for the genetics of the sperm.’ Therefore, he conducted a five-year double-blind, placebo controlled study in which men were required to take high doses of zinc and folic acid while their partners continued other fertility treatments.
The FDA has approved the vitamin cocktail, and Hammoud said the study is safe because his clinic is not handling heavy medications that will have side effects. While the study doesn’t claim to fix couples’ infertility troubles, the Walls’ believe the vitamins were responsible for their success. ‘My sperm count, my testosterone levels were uber-low,’ Jeff said. ‘It was our first shot. We were on the vitamins for 30 days and it was our first try and to have that kind of success is huge.’