After decades of attempts to develop new birth control medications for men, scientists are more hopeful than ever. With new abortion restrictions, demand is growing, experts say.
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On Sunday, at the Endocrine Society’s conference in Boston, researchers with the National Institutes of Health’s Contraceptive Development Program presented encouraging phase 2 trial results on the hormonal gel.
The trial involved 222 men, ages 18 to 50, who applied 5 milliliters of the gel (about a teaspoon) to each of their shoulder blades once per day.
The second part of the two-part trial is still underway. Initial findings showed that the contraceptive worked faster than expected, according to Diana Blithe, chief of NIH’s Contraceptive Development Program.
After 12 weeks of applying the gel every day, 86% of trial participants achieved sperm suppression, meaning they had only up to 1 million sperm per milliliter of semen, the amount the researchers deemed effective for contraception. On average, the timing for effective contraception was eight weeks.
In comparison, normal sperm counts without contraception can range from 15 million to 200 million per milliliter.
Just in case anyone, like me, was wondering how 1 million sperm per ml constitutes effective contraception.
A contraceptive method that only makes you 1/15th as likely to cause pregnancy than usual doesn’t sound great.
And that takes two months to start working.
15 mill is already much less likely to conceive, so that’s like, 1/15th of 50% (I pulled that number out of my ass, fwiw). And 1/200 is better than a condom (1/50), so that’s pretty good, too. And if additional methods are used together, that factors in too.
Yeah, that still seems like a lot of sperm to me, but I don’t know anything about anything.
I know a couple dudes who could use a good slathering of this stuff
