Vasectomy causes dementia?
A medical journal article links vasectomy to two different types of dementia:
Men who have had a vasectomy may face an increased risk of developing a rare type of dementia marked by a steady loss of language skills, researchers said on Tuesday.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, writing in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, linked this male sterilization surgery to a neurological condition called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA.
They surveyed 47 men with the condition being treated at Northwestern's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, as well as 57 men who did not have PPA. Their ages ranged from 55 to 80.
Of those with primary progressive aphasia, 40 percent had undergone a vasectomy, compared to 16 percent of the others. Those with PPA also suffered the ailment an average of four years earlier than the others.
Preliminary data also linked vasectomies to another form of dementia involving behavioral changes. Among 30 men with frontotemporal dementia, more than a third had undergone a vasectomy, the researchers said.
How does this happen?
The study did not look at the mechanism behind any link between PPA and vasectomies, but Weintraub said it may be because the surgery allows sperm to leak into the blood. Antibodies produced by the immune system in response to the sperm might trigger damage that causes dementia, she said.
But given the following paragraph, perhaps I ought to take the whole article with a granuloma of salt (emphasis added):
A vasectomy is an operation in which the tubes through which sperm travels are cut, leaving sperm unable to reach the testes and making a man unable to impregnate a woman.
(Via BaylyBlog.)
5 comments:
I'd tend to take the article with a grain of salt due to the ridiculously small sample size and the fact that they don't say word one about how they controlled for the dozens of other factors that could be in play in this situation.
It sounds from your other posts like you're about as liable to go through with a vasectomy as you are to acquire a talking hedgehog, but if you're truly interested in dementia as a possible upshot of the surgery, see if your library system has a subscription to Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology and read the whole study for yourself.
Look. Get a vasectomy or don't. But if you're not going to get a vasectomy then you are either going to have to find some other form of contraceptive or accept the fact that you are never going to have sex again.
You're treating this like it's a crisis on the order of world hunger. It's not. You go to the doctor, you get snipped. Or she goes to the doctor and takes a little pill every day. Or you go to Walgreens and get a pack of condoms. Leave the philosophical ramifications of birth control to undergrads who wear black berets and drink too much coffee.
I've been looking for info on Vasectomy causes dementia and luckily I ran into your blog, it has great info on what I'm looking and is going to be quite useful for the paper I'm working on.
BTW is crazy how many viagra online blogs I manage to dodge in order to get the right site and the right information.
Thanks for the post and have a nice day.
For a Christian, getting a vasectomy makes it difficult to be "fruitful and multiply" - but then again, that's one of those passages of the Bible that can be ignored, right?
Post a Comment