As you all know, in medicine 2 and 2 there are usually four and anything that is true today can prove false (or almost anything). Cases of diseases that existed for a while and were considered valid to then make them disappear there are some, such as that of the semen allergy, a problem that was considered a cause of fertility.
Semen allergy was in vogue in the seventies and eighties, especially, although cases were also studied in the nineties. When it was suspected that a couple's infertility could be due to a woman's allergy to her husband's sperm, they performed tests to diagnose and treat her.
Four hours after having sex, the mobility of sperm in the mucus of the cervical canal was analyzed. If they saw that mobility was low a long treatment with immunoglobulins was started to avoid the reaction of the woman's body to the semen of the couple.
Semen allergy is a very rare disease
However, those treatments were rarely successful, basically because what was understood as a semen allergy was not really.
To explain a bit in the words of an expert, Juan Antonio García Velasco, director of the Fertility Preservation Plan of IVI, an institution specialized in reproductive medicine:
Allergy to sperm or semen is something really exceptional, if it exists. And, of course, it is not an infertility factor.
He says that each year they treat more than 5,000 patients and In the 15 years they have been working they have never diagnosed a sperm allergy.
But the woman's body can reject sperm
However, it is known that the woman's body can produce antibodies to the sperm, if she recognizes them as foreign cells that she must eliminate. In this case, if many antibodies are generated, sperm motility can be affected and the chances of conceiving a creature can be altered.
It does not mean that semen allergy does not exist
In the year 2010, the magazine Fertility and Sterility He published a work carried out by specialists from the Department of Histology and Biology of Reproduction, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Department of Allergology at the Tenon Hospital in Paris, in which they studied seminal plasma allergy.
In it they explained that it is a very rare disorder, as There are only 80 cases described in the scientific literature.
The symptoms of this allergy can be diverse, and can be mild or severe, depending on whether it affects the local area or systemically. In other words, as with any allergen, it can affect locally, in this case causing vulvovaginitis, or in general, causing an anaphylactic reaction.
In these cases, of course, the use of condoms is necessary. This makes the chances of having children very low, unless artificial intrauterine insemination is performed with washed sperm.
In any case, as we say, It will be news the day a woman is diagnosed with a semen allergy because, for almost 20 years, it has been dismissed that the lack of mobility of sperm comes from an allergy.
