[How to evaluate male fertility in 1984? II. Biology].

If one regards the 10th percentile as the lower limit which permits a semen sample to be regarded as normal in a population, one can show that 42% of infertile men and 71% of fertile men have "normal" semen, but 36% of men considered to be primarily infertile have fertilised their wives in the year which follows their first spermiogram. One can imagine the difficulty of confirming masculine infertility in a particular case. The author studies the laboratory methods which allow the diagnosis of masculine fertility to be improved.