Jeffrey and Michelle Braysich met in 1998. He manages a financial planning company, and she had been employed as his assistant. Within a few months, they started dating. In 2000, they wed.

"It’s pretty obvious we have an age difference," says Jeff, though apart from a tinge of grey in his hair the difference is not as obvious as he suggests. Michelle is 31 and Jeff is 43.

Before they got hitched, the Sydney couple discussed children. Both had nephews and nieces, and both wanted to have children as soon as possible. Jeff had been briefly married once before, with no children from that marriage. Given Michelle’s age, they had anticipated no problems with their plan to have a family.

Ten months after the wedding, however, there was no pregnancy. They suspected they had a fertility problem. More than one, it would turn out.

Men have a biological clock, just like women. Men do not have a uniformly sharp decline in natural fertility, in contrast to women, for whom there is relative infertility from 46 to 50, and the last egg cycle at menopause, on average, at 51. But nor can men any longer consider themselves kings of the natural fertility domain on a bed of lifelong biological good fortune.

That discovery was yet to be made. First, Michelle was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, a condition that ranges from mild to severe, has more than 20 possible and varying symptoms such as irregular periods and cysts, and is a significant cause of infertility, though not necessarily the end of the story to natural conception.

Michelle began taking hormones, and they continued to attempt to conceive a child. "You’re trying to fall pregnant, and to watch everybody else fall pregnant, that’s really hard," she says. "You can really understand how it tears couples apart, because it’s very much a tumultuous time."

"You try to fall pregnant," says Jeff, "and you can’t see anything in a crowd other than prams and children" .

Family and friends would inadvertently apply pressure, with innocent comments that cut deep, such as, "when are you going to have a baby?", or, from those with babes in arms, "you’re next!". Says Jeff: "We made sure that we didn’t let people in public get to us, but privately you’d come home and go, ‘oh God’."

The attempts to have a child continued, without success. So Jeff had his sperm count tested. The couple were shocked at the low count on the scale. The news made Jeff question his masculinity. "You feel stupid," he says. "You just feel like the natural thing of life is reproduction, and you failed.

"It’s hard, you know. I’m six feet tall and reasonably strong and I play a bit of sport. You feel like, gees, you’ve kind of let the family down a bit. Well, not a little bit. A lot.

"I took a bit of time to myself, and spent a bit of time with myself, and tried to rationalise it. And in the end, I just got on with it. You have to pick yourself up."

While sperm counts can and do vary widely between individuals, a fresh body of science suggests age plays a greater role in sperm decline than previously acknowledged. The misconception, says Terri Foran, a sexual health specialist in private practice and former medical director of FPA Health [Family Planning NSW], "is that fertility is a never-ending story for men".

The misconception is fuelled by the exceptions to the rule – after all, Pablo Picasso fathered a child at 68, Charlie Chaplin at 73, and Rupert Murdoch had his sixth child at 72.

But researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, published a study in 2003 of 97 healthy, non-smoking men from which they concluded sperm motility or movement declines with age. The chance of sperm motility being clinically abnormal was 40 per cent by age 30, 60 per cent by age 40, and 85 per cent by age 60, they said. This makes pregnancy tougher to achieve. The chance of lower sperm counts or sperm abnormality also increased, according to the study.

One of the California researchers, Andrew Wyrobek, warned: "These findings have important implications for men who choose to delay fatherhood, since they reduce their chance of success the longer they delay." In 2002, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found in a study of 60 men aged 22 to 60 that those over 35 had higher concentrations of sperm with broken strands of DNA.

Says Terri Foran: "I don’t think men are aware of it at all. Most of the men I speak to think fertility is endless. While women are getting the message loud and clear around biological clocks, it’s important for men to factor it into their lives."

Even when a conception is achieved with an older man’s sperm, she says, there is an increased risk of foetal abnormality and miscarriage. With age, the male body might sustain increased abuse from stress, smoking, heart disease and diabetes, all of which can lower sperm counts, or produce more abnormal sperm: some with two heads or two tails, for instance, "pulling in two different directions".

Mostly, however, fertility doctors and andrologists – named after androgens, the group of hormones that define male sexual characteristics – say men’s fertility declines simply because all body parts wear out.

"Every tissue has a biological clock," says Robert Jansen, director of Sydney IVF. "If the man has a younger wife or partner and they have problems conceiving, more likely it’s that the man has a low sperm count. If the woman is older, it’s more likely she who has the fertility (barrier), and the man is relatively normal."

To determine how many men over 40 had been in a relationship where they
had tried but been unable to have a child and thus may be involuntarily infertile, the Melbourne-based, government-funded organisation Andrology Australia is currently surveying almost 6000 men across the country. In a pilot questionnaire conducted among 400 men over 40 trying for children, 7.2 per cent indicated they had tried but were unable to conceive with a partner.

Whether the low sperm counts of individual cases such as Jeff Braysich are due to getting older is often not clear, however. The director of Andrology Australia and Melbourne’s Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development, David de Kretser, says it is impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of sperm problems in 40 per cent of cases.

Age however has long been known to be a cause of male hormonal problems, given testicular function – essential for sperm and other hormone production – declines from about age 35. There has long been clear data to show that, as a man ages, testicular size declines. One of the first tests a doctor performs when he suspects a patient has a low sperm count is to measure the size of the testes. The tubes that produce sperm take up 90 per cent of the testes’ volume.

Genetics too can sometimes play a part: in 6 to 8 per cent of cases of men with sperm problems, genetic material is missing from the Y chromosome, which has the "propensity to chop out bits of DNA", says de Kretser.

Against this background, lead and other environmental contaminants may be causing falls in sperm counts generally across populations. The evidence is inconclusive, but simultaneous rises of testicular cancer, and genital abnormalities among wild animals such as male alligators in Florida swamplands where the poisonous chemical DDT has been tipped, is adding to concerns about sperm levels in the community.

The good news for male infertility is a quiet technological revolution has been going on in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) laboratories for a decade. It is called ICSI, which stands for intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, or microinjection for short, a specialised form of IVF.

Where traditional IVF involves bringing together sperm and egg in a special plastic dish, ICSI involves the more intricate injecting of a single sperm directly into the cytoplasm or body of the egg. Sometimes a naturally achieved ejaculation suffices as material for the procedure, but even where a man has a zero sperm count, enough sperm can still be surgically extracted from the testes to perform this often successful method.

About 8000 of the 20,000 IVF procedures performed annually in Australia involve ICSI, most often due to sperm being low in number, abnormal, or with poor motility.

The greatest fear of men with sperm problems, says Sydney IVF’s Robert Jansen, is that a sperm donor will replace them. That scenario, he says, is "quite less common now". Even severe male infertility, it seems, can be overcome.

ICSI meant Jeff Braysich could use his own sperm – which, while technically at a failure rate under a sperm count test, was not at the very bottom of the scale, so did not require surgical extraction.

In 2002, Jeff and Michelle enrolled in a Sydney IVF program to attempt several cycles of ICSI. Given the egg and sperm are fused in the laboratory as occurs in standard IVF, the couple had to work with the rhythm of Michelle’s menstrual cycles, and she, again, had to take hormones to assist her body.

The scientists produced five embryos from Jeff’s sperm and Michelle’s eggs. One embryo was then implanted, and four were frozen, possibly as future siblings.

On that day, as a sign of good luck that would only later become clear, a ladybird dropped on Michelle’s leg in the car. Jeff urged her not to brush it off, having been taught as a child that ladybirds were lucky. Then, on the day before Michelle’s pregnancy test, the couple were at a backyard pool party, when dozens of ladybirds began falling into the water. Jeff had the hosts and other guests all rescuing the precious bugs.

Jeff vividly remembers the next day, when Michelle phoned to announce they were pregnant – on this, their first ICSI attempt. During her pregnancy, strangers would stop Michelle in the street, and tell her she was going to have a boy. Family and friends were predicting the same. Michelle and Jeff convinced themselves the child in the womb was male.

The lucky bugs did not appear again until August 13, 2003, when a ladybird landed on Jeff. That day, Michelle delivered Claudia Jo Braysich, a healthy 10-pound girl with a mop of light brown hair. "We waited for her and wanted her so badly," says Jeff. "She’s all we ever wanted." Claudia’s nickname is, of course, ladybird.

HOW ICSI WORKS

Sperm is harvested two ways for use in intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI): from ejaculate that contains a small number of sperm or, if there is virtually no sperm in the ejaculate, then through opening the testes in an operation and surgically removing the sperm. Special microscopes and micromanipulation equipment are employed.

The sperm is picked up in a needle-like injecting pipette. The egg is gently held with a suction pipette, while the sperm is deposited. The day after injection, scientists can tell that fertilisation has taken place if there are two small spheres visible in the egg.

Source: Sydney IVF