[Merric]

Men: Scary News If You Had a Vasectomy
Men who have had a vasectomy face a higher risk of developing a rare form of dementia characterized by a steady loss of language skills, Reuters reports of new research from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Specifically, the male sterilization technique has been linked to a neurological condition called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA.

The study: The team surveyed 47 men who had PPA and were being treated at Northwestern's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center and 57 men who did not have PPA. All of the men ranged in age from 55 to 80. Typically affecting men over age 50, PPA is sometimes mistaken for Alzheimer's disease because the initial symptoms are so similar. Like Alzheimer's it is incurable, but in PPA the nerve cells die only in the area of the brain that governs language skills. Symptoms include faulty recollection of names of people and things, difficulties in speech, reading and writing, and poor comprehension.

The results: Forty percent of the men who had PPA had undergone a vasectomy, compared with just 16 percent of those who didn't have the disease. Those who had vasectomies also suffered the onset of PPA four years earlier than those who weren't sterilized. It gets worse: Preliminary data also linked vasectomies to another form of dementia involving behavioral changes, reports Reuters. Of 30 men who had frontotemporal dementia, more than one-third had had a vasectomy.

Study leader Sandra Weintraub acknowledged that the study was very small, and until more research confirms the findings she says men should not stop getting vasectomies. She also admitted it's the kind of news that scares men--and the women who love them. "I was hoping not to, but unfortunately it's the kind of news that ends up scaring people even though they may not need to be scared," Weintraub told Retuers. "This was just a clinical observation that started with one of my patients telling me that he first noticed the onset of his symptoms a couple of years after he had a vasectomy, and he wondered whether that might have something to do with it. In his mind, these things were connected."

How can a vasectomy cause PPA? Weintrab theorizes the surgery may allow sperm to leak into the blood, which would cause the immune system to produce antibodies to fight the sperm. That might trigger damage that would in turn cause dementia. The research findings were published in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology.

Anyway it seems to me those of you men here who have vasectomies might want to keep track of this subject. And I really don’t know if the monitors here would find this an acceptable excuse to post the Web Url, so if anyone wants to check on this I suggest using the title of this article in a search engine. My best wishes in the end the findings will turn out to be unrelated coincidence or something of the like and as stated towards the articles end there really is nothing to worry about. Just though you'd like to be informed is all