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Psychosocial factors discriminate oligozoospermic from normozoospermic men
Luigi De Gennaro1, Simona Balistreri, Andrea Lenzi
1Department of Psychology, University of Rome "La Sapienza,", Rome, Italy. luigi.degennaro@uniroma1.it
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.