Get ready for male birth control! Yes, that’s right! Scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) say that they very well may have developed a new birth control cream for men and you will never guess where it is to be applied.
Finally, women will not need to take responsibility for birth control. The “Pill” comes with many bad side effects. And men never want to wear a condom. So, what is to be done? Well, the scientists said their research showed that the new cream had 86% effectiveness. It is applied once a day on each shoulder.
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The newly developed male contraceptive gel combines two hormones, segesterone acetate (named Nestorone) and testosterone. The scientists say this suppresses sperm production faster than similar experimental hormone-based methods for male birth control.
Testosterone treatment alone decreases sperm production, with a median time of 15 weeks but the addition of segesterone acetate speeds the time and lowers the dose of testosterone needed to suppress sperm production over testosterone alone, she said. In the daily segesterone-testosterone gel regimen, blood levels of testosterone are kept in the physiologic range to maintain normal sexual function and other androgen-dependent activities.
Most study participants (86%) reached this sperm count by week 15, the researchers reported. Among those men, sperm production was suppressed at a median, or midpoint, time of less than 8 weeks of segesterone-testosterone treatment. Blithe said prior studies of male hormonal contraceptives given by injections showed a median time between 9 and 15 weeks for sperm output to become suppressed.
“The development of a safe, highly effective and reliably reversible contraceptive method for men is an unmet need,” said senior researcher Diana Blithe, Ph.D., chief of the Contraceptive Development Program at the NIH in Bethesda, Md. “While studies have shown that some hormonal agents may be effective for male contraception, the slow onset of spermatogenic suppression is a limitation.”
Early in the study, the researchers measured for suppression of sperm production by obtaining sperm count tests at 4-week intervals. The threshold deemed effective for contraception was 1 million or fewer sperm per milliliter of semen, Blithe noted.
