High incidence of chromosomal abnormalities in large-headed and multiple-tailed spermatozoa.

Case Report To date, several studies of aneuploidy rate in spermatozoa from infertile men have been published. Most of them found an increase incidence of aneuploid spermatozoa in infertile patients compared with normal donors (Moosani et al, 1995; Finkelstein et al, 1998; McInnes et al, 1998; Pang et al, 1999; Rives et al, 1999; Vegetti et al, 2000). However, in other studies, no differences in aneuploidy rates between fertile and infertile men were reported (Miharu et al, 1994; Guttenbach et al, 1997). The evaluated patients often showed different types of sperm parameter impairments, including oligo-, astheno-, oligoastheno-, oligoterato-, oligoastenoterato-, asthenoteratozoospermia, and unexplained infertility, and this may be responsible, at least in part, for the discrepancies observed in the results. Studies taking into account an abnormality for an isolated sperm defect have shown an inverse correlation between sperm aneuploidy and concentration (Bernardini et al, 1998, 2000; Pang et al, 1999; Pfeffer et al, 1999; Rives et al, 1999; Nishikawa et al, 2000; Ushijima et al, 2000; Vegetti et al, 2000; Calogero et al, 2001a; Ohashi et al, 2001; Rubio et al, 2001; Martin et al, 2003). Furthermore, some authors have reported an association between the aneuploidy rate and the presence of abnormal head morphology and particularly with enlarged heads and multiple tails (Yurov et al, 1996; In’t Veld et al, 1997; Bernardini et al, 1998; Viville et al, 2000; Devillard et al, 2002). Because intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is widely acknowledged to be the most effective therapeutic approach for severe male-factor infertility, including ter-