Male Infertility and Risk for Testicular Germ-Cell Cancer

In industrialized countries, testicular germ-cell cancer is the most common malignancy among young men. As the incidence of germ-cell cancer has risen in recent decades, so has the rate of male infertility.

To determine whether these trends are connected, researchers linked records for nearly 23,000 men who were evaluated for infertility in California fertility clinics (1967–1998) with records in California cancer registries. Among men with male-factor infertility, risk for subsequent testicular cancer was higher than that for men in the general population (standardized incidence ratio, 2.8); risk among fertile men was similar to that of the general population.