Does HPV Impact Male Fertility?

I saw on the news that human papillomavirus can impact male fertility, but when I look into the research for it, I keep getting confused about what they’re actually saying. Can you break this down for me? HPV seems super-common in adults and we know it can cause cervical cancer in women, but what about men? Does it have an impact on our fertility or cause other problems for us?

—Marc

You are confused because the research is … confusing. Or at least conflicting. The paper you are reading about is here. What the authors did in it is recruit 205 men, test them for HPV, and collect their sperm. They then performed a set of tests on the sperm that are designed to evaluate sperm quality.

What the authors found is that by the standard sperm quality measures — mobility (how they move), morphology (whether they look normal), and viability (whether they are live) — there were no differences by HPV status. However, when the authors looked at some secondary metrics, including types of sperm death, they did find some differences.

That makes this particular result a little hard to interpret in terms of how it relates to fertility. We know that these standard sperm parameters relate to male fertility, but we know less about the links between these secondary metrics and infertility. Which is to say: by standard WHO guidelines, the sperm from participants with HPV looks good, and it seems like fertility would be similar. But it could be that some of these secondary characteristics matter.

This paper is fairly representative of the literature. A review article notes that while there is possible reason to think HPV could impact sperm, and some evidence (like the above article) of some sperm parameters being affected, there is little good evidence on the direct impact on fertility. Moreover, even the direct sperm evidence is conflicting.

The bottom line is that more research is needed on this, but I think what we can say is that if there is an effect, it is quite small. Given the amount of research, a very large effect would be detected more consistently. It’s much harder to rule out a small effect.

As a forward-going note: We are lucky that for the next generation we have an HPV vaccine, which will prevent cancer in girls and perhaps protect sperm too.