Psychosocial factors discriminate oligozoospermic from normozoospermic men.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the profile of psychosocial variables in a group of oligozoospermic and normozoospermic men for assessing the hypothesis of a relationship between impaired seminal status and psychosocial factors. DESIGN: Double-blind investigation of the psychosocial differences between oligozoospermics and normozoospermics. SETTINGS: Healthy volunteers in a clinical environment. PATIENT(S): Two hundred eighty men attending their first seminal examination. INTERVENTION(S): We selected 37 oligozoospermic patients on the basis of sperm concentration and 37 normozoospermic controls for comparison. OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Differences in alexithymia (difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, externally oriented thinking), personality traits (extroversion, neuroticism, psychoticism), and coping style toward stressors (task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping, avoidance-oriented coping) were assessed in the two groups. RESULT(S): Wilk's Lambda (.79) of the discriminant analysis showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups. The following variables met the inclusion criterion in the discriminant function: psychoticism and difficulty describing feeling. This analysis also showed a high probability of correct classification of oligozoospermic men on the basis of the psychosocial variables. CONCLUSION(S): The relationship between psychosocial variables and seminal status has been confirmed in a group of oligozoospermic and normozoospermic men.