What causes Teratozoospermia?

I've obviously been doing a lot of research into this recently, while I'm now convinced there appears to be a link between a lack of antioxidants and Teratozoospermia (see previous post), it doesn't explain everything away.

I know people who are a lot older than me, people who drink excessively, smoke, don't exercise and are generally unhealthy who have all managed to have kids.

It doesn't make sense, people have been having kids since the dawn of time without requiring huge amount of antioxidants, there must be more to it, so i did some more digging and here's what i found;

1. Nobody really knows what causes it

That's it!

Hodgkin's disease, coeliac disease, Crohn's disease, smoking, Varicocele, drugs, STD's, poor diet, pesticides, infections, excessive heat, diabetes, age, chemotherapy, excessive trauma, pollution, lifestyle.

All of these things could contribute to poor sperm morphology and lead to Teratozoospermia. But this is largely theoretical or based on limited evidence. And none of them truly impact me.

The only things i can think of which may apply to me could be Alcohol and genetics;

Alcohol; Yes, it appears as though Alcohol can really mess things up;

-  Alcohol can have profound deleterious effects at all levels of the male reproductive system.

- 'It causes impaired testosterone production, enormous testicular oxidative stress and testicular atrophy.'

ENORMOUS Oxidative stress! Time and time again it appears as a cause of poor sperm morphology, however I don't think i drink enough Alcohol to cause catastrophic damage to my sperm production, i probably only drink about 7 beers a week on average (but that's usually in one evening). That might cause some damage, but wouldn't be enough to render me totally infertile surely?

There's another study about the link between Oxidative Stress and Sperm which included some interesting figures about alcohol (see below) - people who had consumed alcohol in the last 3 months had a significantly lower sperm count, but they actually had slightly higher motility and concentration;

There are a lot more factors in play here which I'm breezing over, but essentially I'm just going to cut back on Alcohol. No more than 2 beers in any one evening should be fine, I'm not going to cut it out completely (that would be just too depressing!)

Genetics; A few websites touch upon this. They essentially suggest that the factory which produces the sperm is defective due to my genetics. Therefore the factory produces defective sperm with fragmented DNA. If this is the case then there is truly nothing that can be done for me, its simply the way I've been built, i cant change that any more than i can change the colour of my eyes... This study talks a little bit more about missing DNA sequences which could cause sperm to be defective, but it doesn't really mean much to me.

Perhaps my Dad has Teratozoospermia and its been passed on to me & amplified? Who knows (I'm hoping its not that).