Perspectives: The Possible Influence of Assisted Reproductive Technologies on Transgenerational Reproductive Effects of Environmental Endocrine Disruptors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Demasculinization by environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) is observed in many animal species but less evident in humans. Rodent studies with gestational exposure to either the fungicide vinclozolin or the insecticide methoxychlor demonstrate impaired male fertility with abnormal DNA methylation patterns in spermatozoa. Once established, these epigenetic changes may be permanent and thus paternally passed to subsequent generations. Conclusive evidence of a similar phenomenon in humans has not been established, but several observations bring up the possibility. Some, but not all, studies show an increase in male genital abnormalities after prenatal EDC exposure. Other studies demonstrate sperm abnormalities in males with EDC contact, although it is unclear as to whether this is due to prenatal or postnatal exposure. Although not examined in males with EDC exposure, one study shows gamete DNA methylation abnormalities in males with severe oligospermia. A subsequent study failed to corroborate these findings. The use of assisted reproductive techniques including intracytoplasmic sperm injection has removed natural selection barriers thus enabling reproduction in males that would otherwise be sterile. This review explores the hypothesis that prenatal EDC exposure results in transgenerational male reproductive abnormalities propagated by the use of assisted reproductive technologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".