Occupation and male infertility: glycol ethers and other exposures
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To investigate the relation between male infertility and occupational exposures, particularly glycol ethers. METHODS: A case-referent study was designed in which men attending 14 fertility clinics in 11 centres across the UK in 1999-2002 were recruited following 12 months of unprotected intercourse and without a previous semen analysis. Cases were those with low motile sperm concentration (MSC) relative to the time since their last ejaculation (MSC <12 x 10(6) for 3 days of abstinence). Referents were other men attending these clinics and meeting the inclusion criteria. A single semen sample was collected at the clinic and analysed at the andrology laboratory serving each hospital. Concentration was determined manually with motility assessed centrally from video recordings. Exposures and confounding factors were assessed from self-completed and nurse-interviewer questionnaires, completed prior to the results of the semen analysis. The occupational histories were assessed for exposures relative to UK norms by a team of occupational hygienists blind to case status. RESULTS: Of 2118 men in employment at the time of the interview, 874 (41.3%) were cases. Work with organic solvents, particularly glycol ethers, in the 3 months before the first clinic visit was associated with the likelihood of low motile sperm count. Unadjusted odds ratios (OR) for moderate and high glycol ether exposure (compared with none) were 1.70 (95% CI: 1.11 to 2.61) and 2.54 (95% CI: 1.24 to 5.21). Adjustment for potential confounders (surgery to the testes, previous conception, wearing boxer shorts, drinking alcohol, employed in manual work) reduced the risk associated with glycol ether exposure: moderate OR = 1.46 (95% CI: 0.93 to 2.28), high OR = 2.25 (95% CI: 1.08 to 4.69). No other occupational risk factor was identified. CONCLUSIONS: Glycol ether exposure was related to low motile sperm count in men attending fertility clinics. This suggests that, at the time of the study, glycol ethers continued to be a hazard for male fertility.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it