Deoxycholic Acid Impairs Human Sperm Quality and Function Through Oxidative Stress-Driven Damage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infertility is a growing global health concern, with male infertility contributing to nearly half of all cases. While conventional semen analysis often overlooks functional impairments, oxidative stress has emerged as a key factor affecting sperm quality. Notably, oxidative stress is elevated in obesity, a rising epidemic affecting more than 1 in 8 people worldwide. This study examines the role of deoxycholic acid (DCA), a secondary bile acid that is elevated in obesity, and its potential to induce oxidative stress and impair sperm function. Semen samples from healthy donors were incubated with DCA, and its effects on sperm motility, viability, capacitation, and oxidative stress markers were assessed. Sperm motility and viability were evaluated using computer-assisted semen analysis (CASA) and hypo-osmotic swelling (HOS) tests, while sperm capacitation was measured via tyrosine phosphorylation (P-Tyr) and acrosome reaction (AR). Oxidative stress markers were quantified using flow cytometry. While progressive motility and viability remained unchanged, DCA reduced hyperactive motility, P-Tyr, and acrosome reaction and increased oxidative stress markers in spermatozoa. These findings suggest that secondary bile acids can disrupt sperm function through oxidative mechanisms, affecting non-conventional semen parameters that may go undetected in standard analyses. This underscores the gut-testis axis's role in male infertility and highlights the need for more comprehensive diagnostics and targeted therapies.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".