Yes, you read that right. Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that smoking cannabis may actually be good for men’s sperm counts. At least according to a recent study published in the medical journal Human Reproduction.
Researchers analyzed information provided from 662 men (and their partners) being evaluated for infertility from 2000 to 2017 at the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center. The men answered questions on how often they smoked cannabis and other drugs while also providing sperm and blood samples. 55 percent of the men reported smoking cannabis in their lifetime, while 11 percent said they were current cannabis smokers. The researchers discovered that the men who reported ever having smoked cannabis had an average sperm concentration of 63 million sperm per milliliter of semen, while that number decreased to just 45 million among those who had never smoked cannabis.
The findings held up even after the researchers took into account additional factors that could have affected sperm concentration, such as cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and age. Even more surprising, only 5 percent of the cannabis smokers had lower than normal sperm concentrations (lower than 15 million sperm per milliliter of semen), while that number increased to 12 percent in those who never smoked cannabis. In addition, those who smoked cannabis also had higher testosterone levels than those who smoked less often.
The study comes as a bit of a shock, since previous research has suggested that cannabis may actually lower a man’s sperm count, especially among heavy smokers. Just as recently as 2015, researchers in Denmark found that men who smoked cannabis more than once a week had sperm counts nearly 30 percent lower than those who didn’t.
“Our findings were contrary to what we hypothesized at the start of the study,” said the study’s lead author, Feiby Nassan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Still, this doesn’t mean you should start smoking cannabis to try and up your sperm count. The findings are far from conclusive and more research is certainly needed to understand the full effects cannabis may have on sperm production. Plus, the researchers also noted that their study was conducted among men visiting a fertility clinic, so the results may be quite different than those from the general population. In addition, men in the study self-reported their cannabis use, so it’s possible that some participants were not completely honest about their cannabis use due to both the social stigma and, more importantly, the legality of the drug in Massachusetts at the time the data was collected.
Conclusion? While there certainly seems to be some sort of link, the exact nature of that link is still up for debate. It may be that low or moderate levels of cannabis use has a beneficial effect on sperm production, while heavier use reverses this effect. Or it could simply mean that men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to engage in certain risky behavior, among that being drug use—the researchers originally discovered the link between cannabis and sperm count because men with higher testosterone (within normal levels) have higher sperm counts and are more likely to smoke cannabis. Either way, one thing’s for sure—if you’re having sperm count issues, getting high won’t necessarily make them go away. But it will certainly make you forget about them.
