Testicular insufficiency

Some people feel that their testicles are not full. In fact, the shape of the testicles is not a perfect circle, but an ellipse. When you have a certain disease, you may have an insufficiency of the testicles. For example, if you have a chronic wasting disease or an endocrine dysfunction disease, you may have testicular atrophy. Let's learn about the relevant situation of orchitis.

Orchitis is an inflammatory disease characterized by infiltration of intratesticular inflammatory cells and damage to the seminiferous tubules.

Orchitis is usually caused by bacteria and viruses. The testicles themselves rarely have bacterial infections because they have a rich supply of blood and lymph and are more resistant to bacterial infections. Bacterial orchitis is mostly caused by inflammation of the adjacent epididymis, so it is also called epididymo-orchitis. Common pathogens are Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Escherichia coli, etc. Viruses can directly invade the testicles, the most common of which is the mumps virus. This pathogen itself mainly invades the parotid glands of children. However, this virus is also good at invading the testicles, so viral orchitis is often easy to occur shortly after the onset of mumps. In addition, experimental autoimmune orchitis (EAO) is a reproductive immunology disease with chronic testicular inflammation as the main pathological change.

The main manifestations of orchitis are damage to the seminiferous tubules, infiltration of leukocytes around the seminiferous tubules, and a significant decrease in the number of sperm, resulting in dead sperm, azoospermia, and loss of fertility. In addition, factors such as antisperm antibodies produced in orchitis, insufficient blood supply, and activated inflammatory cells can induce damage to the blood-testis barrier, affecting the differentiation activity of spermatogenic cells, thereby causing sperm production disorders and directly leading to male infertility.