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. 2020 Oct 15;30:16. doi: 10.1186/s12610-020-00114-4

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — Influence of environmental and lifestyle factors throughout a man’s life. Numerous environmental or lifestyle factors can affect testicular development and function during both fetal life and adulthood. Exposure to these factors via the mother during pregnancy can affect the differentiation and/or endocrine functions of the fetal testis resulting in a reduced synthesis of androgens by Leydig cells and/or reduction in the final number of Sertoli cells. This can lead to an irreversible reduction in sperm count and sperm fertilizing capacities in adulthood. In adult men, the effects of environmental or lifestyle factors can affect spermatogenesis and/or the production and action of androgens. However, the impact is likely to be reversible because a new cycle of spermatogenesis is taking place approximatively every 74 days