Should I consider that a decrease from 96% to 87% in viability, and from 94 to 72 in motility is pathologic ? The results are statistically different, but I am not sure about the biologic relevance of these differences.
Dear Florian, In andrology (human) less than 40% of motility and viability is considered problematic and the patient is rendered subfertile. I wont use the word pathogenic in 87% and 72% for viability and motiliy. If you are treating the rats with some toxicant/chemical then these observations suggest a subtle effect. However the biologically significant effect should be concluded when the motiliy and viability are under 50%. As a 10-20% decrease from 90+% can be attributed to the handling and the processing of the samples. I hope it helps your query.
To the my knowledge there are no defined cut off values for rat semen parameters. If this is a result from case controlled study you can say the effect of intervention is significantly reduce the parameters. But we cant conclude on the fertilization capacity using this difference. You can observe the long term effect of the treatment because the minor variations are temporary effects and can recover soon.
To the best of my knowledge, definitely the values what you have given i.e. 87% viability and 72% motility are not considered as pathogenic. These comes under normal only. If it below 60 or in particular if it is less than 50% then it is considered as pathogenic.
Dear Florian.
I would definitely not consider such drop in parameters of quality of semen as pathologic. I agree with the rest of the people writing answers. In case you designed some toxicology study or you are studying the effect of incubation time on mentioned parameters there might be a statistical differences. But (from the biological point of view) I would not consider semen with mentioned parameters as infertile. What is your hypothesis in your research?
Good luck with your research.
Very handy discussion agreed if someone claims reduction in count or motility it should be below 50% otherwise fall into normal and mild errors can happens account 10-20% can not be labelled as infertile
I just concluded a toxicological study too and the same question came to my mind. I strongly agree with the above submission which is values less than 60-70% indicates a possible response to an agent if not checked would lead to a pathologic conditions which would be seen in values less than 50%.
My own question is, at what values can we consider sperm concentration pathologic
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