I cannot comment on the cellular content because, despite the scale bar at the bottom of each picture, it seem to me all the pictures are at a different magnification.
They are all the same magnification. It doesn't look like a confocal or other microscope with a variable zoom, likely just a standard one with a set of objective lenses. Cells are not uniform, and if you look closely, you'll see individual cells within a similar size range among the images. A few big structures obscure the scale. While the authors need to specify the scale, it looks similar enough to me, though histology isn't my field.
Edit: Here's a fun little interactive thing. If you zoom in and move around you'll see the variation in cell size for the testes in a histological slide, should give you an idea of scale
- the samples are from a Biobank. It’s very difficult to access such samples. There is no point banking samples before a certain stage of puberty becasue they do not contain mature gametes - yet the way it’s written seems to indicate that some of these samples have been taken as ‘fertility preservation.’ But that’s a contradiction in terms. If they’re blocking your puberty the chances of you being old enough to have mature gametes is much lower. Are these kids being told they can preserve sperm samples and they will have fertility later? That’s very sketchy.
- what’s needed is also samples from kids who have been on blockers for varying amounts of time and then come off them/ gone or not into cross sex hormones etc.
That's in the references in the methods:
"In pre-pubertal males, TTC is the sole FP option currently available. Due to the relatively novel nature of testicular tissue cryopreservation, there have been no live births using this tissue in humans. Thus, TTC is still considered experimental by the ASRM9. However, reports of functional sperm and/or healthy offspring in other mammalian species combined with advancements in tissue-based technologies show promise."
It's a shot in the dark, aka, for research. if a kid gets childhood cancer, there is a chance that maybe in the future we can mature the frozen tissue in a lab and do a type of IVF. They aren't making promises, it's more future proofing and obtaining samples to test. We can transform skin cells to sperm cells through mild chemical exposure, and do same-sex reproduction, in mice. Decades off, maybe we can stimulate human cells to mature properly.
As for the control groups, yeah, but that's easier said than done. Given that this was from tissue samples from a biobank from a specific organization, what are the odds you'll get enough patients with these conditions and similar treatment times? They only had 19 GD patients anyway; most were cancer patients. This study is the red flag for adding this metric to clinical trials (or well, how it SHOULD be, anyway, we all know activists will do anything to prevent actual research).
