Couples who make love with the intention of having a baby should have sex twice within one hour, a study in Britain recommends. The research found that pregnancy rate went up to 21 percent when a second sample of sperm is provided within 60 minutes.

Dr Gulam Bahadur, lead author of the study and infertility specialist at the North Middlesex University Hospital, explains that higher quality of sperm is produced during a second ejaculation. The advice goes against conventional wisdom that suggest for men to abstain from having a semen release if he wants to impregnate his wife or partner to accumulate more sperm, reports the New York Daily News.

But all it does is the male releases only a lot of old sperm. A second ejaculation releases new sperm, says Bahadur. “People still think that if you want to have a baby, you should save up sperm when, in fact, not having sex is very bad for men because it affects sperm quality. The fresher the sperm, the better its condition,” he continues.

He presented the result of his preliminary research in June at the yearly gathering of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. The study used a method of artificial fertility, the intrauterine insemination (IUI) which was more successful when the sample of the man’s second ejaculation was used rather than the first release.

The study, done in 2014, involved 73 couples in which the IUI success rate went up to 21 percent from 6 percent. Bahadur, while offering cautious enthusiasm about their findings, says that even if it is a relatively small study, “it would be reasonable to assume the same effect would apply to men trying to conceive naturally,” reports Medicaldaily.

He adds that IUI success rate is comparable with another more popular method, in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), which is 10 to 50 percent, depending on the age of the couple. With their experiment, the second release of sperm is collected and inseminated into a woman when she is ovulating, while with IVF, the sperm and egg meet outside the woman’s body and the embryo that was formed later inserted into the woman’s uterus.

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