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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Important to note, it can also cause birth defects in male offspring when taken by fathers.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/03/birth-defects...

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4389

> Men who filled metformin prescriptions before or after the three-month period of sperm development did not have offspring with a higher incidence of birth defects, the study found.

what does that mean ? is there a season for sperm development ?

It's continuous. Mean make sperm constantly, and the sperm die constantly.

What the study shows is that if there's an effect it would have to be in the short time between the sperm developing and dying

TL; DR Do not take if you're trying to impregnate someone. (Is that the right term? Get pregnant?)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/impregnate#Verb (Sense 1)

"impregnate" is not wrong per-se, but it is weird in placing the emphasis on only one of the two people required. Usually you'd say something like "trying for a child", I believe.

It's not weird in this case, because the drug specifically affects male sperm, and it's the man who impregnates the woman.

It's weird regardless of the drug.

While more study is warranted, I believe the thesis is there is possibly a similar mechanism to how anti parasitics kill parasites during a specific window of their development cycle (with little effect outside of those windows).

That study doesn't claim causation.

Unfortunately the press release—and the author quotes within it—are worded in such a way that it is implied.

As far as population studies go, this one seems pretty good though. There's a clear pattern attributable to the lifecycle of sperm, very large sample size, and pretty good controls.

I would definitely take this study seriously, and I don't usually pay a huge amount of attention to population studies.

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