Vitamin D3 treatment regulates apoptosis, antioxidant defense system, and DNA integrity in the epididymal sperm of an aged rat model

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of vitamin D3 in the epididymal sperm cells of D-gal-induced aged rats. It is well known that during aging sperm quality and quantity declines and leads to age-related infertility problems in males. The results of the present study showed that there were elevated levels of oxidative stress and poor DNA integrity of sperm of aged rats. The expression of BCL2 also showed a significant decline in the sperm of aged rats, however, the expression of BAX and active caspase-3 did not show significant change compared with the control group. The treatment of vitamin D3 at lower doses to aged rats showed increased expression of BAX and active caspase-3 in the sperm, this finding suggests that increased apoptosis may be responsible for removal of poor quality sperm during aging. Vitamin D3 treatment at both doses showed improvement in the oxidative stress and DNA integrity in the sperm of aged rats. We also investigated the expression of AGER, visfatin, and HSPA1A in the epididymal sperm. It has been found that expression of AGER, visfatin, and HSPA1A increased in the sperm aged rats and vitamin D3 treatments at both doses decreased its expression. Thus, it might be suggested that during aging vitamin D3 treatment would be important for managing the sperm quality by regulating the apoptosis, antioxidant system and DNA integrity via modulation of visfatin and HSPA1A.