If you are pregnant or planning to get pregnant and you also someday want to be a grandmother, there's a new reason to not drink while you are pregnant, according to Danish researchers. Drinking while pregnant has been found to effect the sperm of sons when they become adults.Although heavy drinking during pregnancy may not make sons infertile, it may make it more difficult for them to produce sperm.
The researchers at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark studied 347 sons born to 12,000 women who were questioned about their drinking while pregnant.
Lower Sperm Count Risk
Those who had been exposed to heavy alcohol use while in the womb had sperm concentrations one third lower than those men exposed to little or no alcohol in the womb.
The author of the study, Dr. Cecilia Ramlau-Hansen, stopped short of saying alcohol exposure in the womb would make a man infertile, but a lower sperm concentration means it will take more time or make it more difficult to make their partners pregnant.
For the study heavy alcohol use was described as 4.5 or more drinks a week.
The study was presented this week at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Rome in June 2010.
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