Spinal Cord Fertility

How CRH Can Help You

First and foremost, we are a team of caring medical professionals dedicated to providing you with the best in reproductive healthcare that medical science has available.  We conduct a state-of-the-art, comprehensive analysis to diagnose and treat your fertility issues.  One area where we stand out from the crows is in treating patients with spinal cord injuries.  Obviously, spinal cord injuries (SCI) are of great concern to the patient causing many challenges in his or her approach to life.  However, we believe that these patients can have children and become great parents, active and involved in a child's life.

We have found that most SCI patients are males of parenting age.  The injury brings about impairment in erectile and ejaculatory dysfunction, from which the patient will not usually "recover."  This comes in contrast to women SCI patients, who may have difficulty ovulating for about a year after their injury.  Here, however, recovery is fairly consistent; most women recover and are able to conceive and bear children.

For this reason, the Center focuses on the challenges facing the male SCI patient.  We have developed a new approach in managing this lack of ejaculation.  Our procedures are much less invasive than most and are proving to be very successful.  In fact, we have one of the highest success rates in infertility therapy in the nation.

How We Do It

The management of anejaculation in Spinal Cord Injury patients is not new and some less invasive procedures have been available during the last several years. However, the viable pregnancy rates continue to be very low (as low as 10% per patient or 10% per treatment action depending on the program). The reason for the low success is the lack of adequate management of the male factor. The male factor typically consists of oligoasthenozoospermia, decreased normal morphology, failed sperm capacitation and lack of fertilization and embryo cleavage.

At the Center, we use vibratory stimulation to produce an ejaculation in men with spinal cord injuries. This is a less invasive technology, especially when compared to the more traditional approaches of electro-ejaculation and microsurgical sperm aspirations. A vibrator is placed either on the base or the glans of the penis. The medical staff carefully adjusts the displacement amplitude and vibration frequency to maximize ejaculation based on the level and completeness of the patient's spinal cord injury.

Following ejaculation, the specimen is examined in our own fully licensed laboratories. Then the sperm are cryo-preserved and stored in liquid nitrogen to avoid the need for additional induced ejaculation. The sperm will then be used for the highly successful fertility treatments already established at the Center.

For more detailed information on vibratory stimulation, see Penile Vibratory Stimulation (PVS).

How We Measure Up

Low success rates costs Spinal Cord Injury patients large out of pocket expenses every year as infertility care is not covered by insurance. Our philosophy of medical care is to minimize the number of treatment actions per birth (presently is 1.2-2.0 treatments per birth in patients of all ages). The use of our fully licensed and state-of-the-art laboratory in combination with clinical assisted reproductive techniques maximizes outcome among our patients.

Please review our success rates. Several of our patients with Spinal Cord Injury and male factor infertility are included in these statistics.

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