Ejaculatory duct obstruction

Ejaculatory duct obstruction (EDO) is a pathological condition which is characterized by the obstruction of one or both ejaculatory ducts. Thus, the efflux of (most constituents of) semen is not possible. It can be congenital or acquired. It is a cause of male infertility and/or pelvic pain. Ejaculatory duct obstruction must not be confused with an obstruction of the vas deferens. If both ejaculatory ducts are completely obstructed, affected men will demonstrate male infertility due to aspermia/azoospermia. They will suffer from a very low volume of semen which lacks the gel-like fluid of the seminal vesicles or from no semen at all while they are able to have the sensation of an orgasm during which they will have involuntary contractions of the pelvic musculature. This is contrary to some other forms of anejaculation. In addition, it is reported to be a cause for pelvic pain, especially shortly after ejaculation. In case of proven fertility but unresolved pelvic pain, even one or both partially obstructed ejaculatory ducts may be the origin of pelvic pain and oligospermia. Ejaculatory duct obstruction may result in a complete lack of semen (aspermia) or a very low-volume semen (oligospermia) which may contain only the secretion of accessory prostate glands downstream to the orifice of the ejaculatory ducts. In addition to the congenital form which is often caused by cysts of the müllerian duct the obstruction can be acquired due to an inflammation caused by chlamydia, prostatitis, tuberculosis of the prostate and other pathogens. In addition, calculus was reported to mechanically block the ejaculatory duct, leading to infertility. However, in many patients, there is no history of an inflammation and the underlying cause simply remains unknown. Low-volume, runny/fluid semen (oligospermia) or no semen at all (dry ejaculation/aspermia) are a logical consequence of an obstruction downstream of the seminal vesicles which contribute most to the volume of the semen. Usually, men will be able to observe a runny/fluid, low-volume semen by themselves during masturbation.

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Aspermia

Aspermia is the complete lack of semen with ejaculation (not to be confused with azoospermia, the lack of sperm cells in the semen). It is associated with infertility. One of the causes of aspermia is retrograde ejaculation, because of that the sperm is kept into the bladder and the final ejaculate is 0 mL. It can be brought on by excessive drug use, or as a result of prostate surgery. It can also be caused by alpha blockers such as tamsulosin and silodosin.

Male infertility

Male infertility refers to a sexually mature male's inability to impregnate a fertile female. In humans it accounts for 40–50% of infertility. It affects approximately 7% of all men. Male infertility is commonly due to deficiencies in the semen, and semen quality is used as a surrogate measure of male fecundity. More recently, advance sperm analyses that examine intracellular sperm components are being developed.

Ejaculation

Ejaculation is the discharge of semen (the ejaculate; normally containing sperm) from the male reproductive tract as a result of an orgasm. It is the final stage and natural objective of male sexual stimulation, and an essential component of natural conception. Ejaculation can occur spontaneously during sleep, and is a normal part of human sexual development (a nocturnal emission or "wet dream"). In rare cases, ejaculation occurs because of prostatic disease. Anejaculation is the condition of being unable to ejaculate.

Male Reproductive System Anatomy BIO-320: Morphology I

Explains the male reproductive system anatomy, including vas deferens, prostate, and seminal vesicles.

What graph neural networks cannot learn: depth vs width

Andreas Loukas

This paper studies the expressive power of graph neural networks falling within the message-passing framework (GNNmp). Two results are presented. First, GNNmp are shown to be Turing universal under sufficient conditions on their depth, width, node attribut ...

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Sexual conflict drives male manipulation of female postmating responses in Drosophila melanogaster

Laurent Keller, Brian Dennis Hollis

In many animals, females respond to mating with changes in physiology and behavior that are triggered by molecules transferred by males during mating. In Drosophila melanogaster, proteins in the seminal fluid are responsible for important female postmating ...

PNAS2019

Of Choices, Failures and Asynchrony: The Many Faces of Set Agreement

Rachid Guerraoui, Seth Gilbert, Dan Alistarh

Set agreement is a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which processes collectively choose a small subset of values from a larger set of proposals. The impossibility of fault-tolerant set agreement in asynchronous networks is one of the seminal ...

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