Volume and count

My name’s Sarah Matthews, I’m a subspecialist fertility doctor based at the Portland hospital in London.

I’m going to have a chat with you today about doing a sperm test and interpreting the results.

You’ve got low volume, low volume quite often it’s because you missed the pot and I’ve swept up carpet strands and all sorts of guys that have missed the pot.

But assuming you’ve got it all in the pot, do you know what it’s absolutely normal for it not to feel as good as it does when you’re having sex and that quite often reflects in the volume that is produced.

So don’t panic. If it doesn’t look like the normal sample for you or what you expected.

Number two is count, if your count is low, it may be a fluctuate thing. If you’ve had an infection in the last three months, if you put the COVID, that will have a major impact on the count.

And some guys have a fluctuating count where one day they’d got good next day, it can be half of what they had the previous day.

So next thing you need to look at is the count is the count over 20 million, 15 million are tops for normal.

It’s quite okay if you get account less than 10, some guys are very, very sensitive. And if you do a check the next day, you could have doubled the sperm there, or you could have half the sperm there.

If you do get a low sperm count, we would normally recommend that we repeat the test in three months and things like infections, especially COVID can have a major impact on a sperm sample on any particular day, along with stress and some other factors as well.