Male contraceptive pill 'safe'
2006-04-28 11:20
Paris - Worries that the male contraceptive pill may wreck a man's chance of fathering a child are unfounded, says a study into the prototype contraception.
The male pill was being explored as an alternative to the three conventional male contraceptive methods - the condom, withdrawal and vasectomy - which were regarded by many as insufficiently reliable or difficult to reverse.
It uses the hormone androgen to suppress sperm production to zero or negligible levels. Two large-scale trials were under way in China and Europe.
Doctors in the United States and Australia assessed the outcome of 30 smaller trials, involving about 1 500 men in all.
All participants recovered fertility after they stopped taking the hormones. On average, it took 3.4 months to achieve this, defined as a threshold of 20 million sperm per millilitre.
Peter Liu of the ANZAC Research Institute at the University of Sydney said: "These findings... increase the promise of new contraceptive drugs, allowing men to share more fairly the satisfaction and burden of family planning."