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What is driving the global decline of human fertility? Need for a multidisciplinary approach to the underlying mechanisms
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This paper examines the many factors driving the worldwide drop in human fertility rates, including delayed childbearing, obesity, and environmental toxicants such as nanoplastics and air pollution that harm reproductive health. The authors warn that these trends could have devastating public health consequences for our species if the underlying causes are not addressed.
An intense period of human population expansion over the past 250 years is about to cease. Total fertility rates are falling dramatically all over the world such that highly industrialized nations, including China and the tiger economies of SE Asia, will see their populations decline significantly in the coming decades. The socioeconomic, geopolitical and environmental ramifications of this change are considerable and invite a multidisciplinary consideration of the underlying mechanisms. In the short-term, socioeconomic factors, particularly urbanization and delayed childbearing are powerful drivers of reduced fertility. In parallel, lifestyle factors such as obesity and the presence of numerous reproductive toxicants in the environment, including air-borne pollutants, nanoplastics and electromagnetic radiation, are seriously compromising reproductive health. In the longer term, it is hypothesized that the reduction in family size that accompanies the demographic transition will decrease selection pressure on high fertility genes leading to a progressive loss of human fecundity. Paradoxically, the uptake of assisted reproductive technologies at scale, may also contribute to such fecundity loss by encouraging the retention of poor fertility genotypes within the population. Since the decline in fertility rate that accompanies the demographic transition appears to be ubiquitous, the public health implications for our species are potentially devastating.
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This review examines how environmental contaminants, including microplastics, air pollution, heavy metals, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, may contribute to declining male fertility. The study suggests these environmental toxins can impair sperm function through oxidative stress, hormonal imbalance, and inflammation, and highlights the need for integrating environmental exposure data into fertility assessments.
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