Erkek infertilitesi ile genotoksisite parametreleri ve polimorfizm ilişkisinin araştırılması

Today, it is clearly known that almost half of the infertility cases are contributed by the male factor. Regardless from the disorder type, male factor infertility is strongly related with genetics. Almost in every case diagnosed as primary infertility, there is an underlying genetic reason, which reflects to the phenotype as a disorder. Therefore, it is crucial to clarify the genetic causes of male infertility. The aim of this study was to assess the genetics-male infertility relationship by focusing on the contributions of the: (a) genetic background, (b) genotoxic damage on sperm cells and (c) accumulated somatic damage. To achieve this goal, sperm and blood samples of 82 infertile men and 63 healthy controls that have applied to an Artificial Reproductive Techniques clinic have been collected to assess: (1)Role of genetic background by Polymorphisms on 2 different genes in 2 different pathways of male infertility: AR gene (involved in endocrine regulation of spermatogenesis) and GSTM1 gene (involved in common cell functions) (2)Genotoxic damage on sperm chromatin by Comet assay and (3) Accumulated somatic damage by Comet and MN assays on lymphocytes. In addition, all sperm parameters have been recorded in order to analyse possible correlations with any of our assessments above. According to our findings, only Comet assay on sperm cells appears to have a relationship with infertility. The lack of association for the other parameters emphasis the need for further research on those topics. Yet the sperm parameters are not enough to assess the DNA damage of the sperm cell, assisted reproduction era that is mainly based on only initial analysis of sperm appears to have big gap. According to the results of our study, we can conclude that, Sperm Comet Assay could be used as a biomarker of damaged sperm cell to evaluate the DNA damage of the male, and may become a novel biomarker for the individualized treatment of the male infertility, which is the ultimate goal.