High mobile phone use may impact sperm count, study says
Male sperm count has fallen by more than 50% globally in the last 50 years, leaving researchers scrambling to understand why. Could it be pollution, PFAS and other potential toxins in our food and water, an increase in obesity and chronic disease, or even the ever-present mobile phone?
A new study explored the role of cell phones and found men between the ages of 18 and 22 who said they used their phones more than 20 times a day had a 21% higher risk for a low overall sperm count. The men also had a 30% higher risk for a low sperm concentration, a less important measure of sperm count in a milliliter of semen. The study did not specify whether the men called or texted or used their phones to do both.
[...] "I am intrigued by the observation that the biggest effect was apparently seen with older 2G and 3G phones compared to modern 4G and 5G versions. This is not something I am able to explain," said Allan Pacey, deputy vice president and deputy dean of the faculty of biology, medicine and health at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, in a statement. He was not involved in the study.
[...] Results showed that men who used their phones one to five times a day or less than once a week had much higher sperm counts and concentration. As cell phone usage climbed, sperm count dropped, with the lowest levels among men using their phone 20 or more times a day.
Tin foil underwear is an excellent and high fashion accessory to go with tin foil hats.
See Also:
- Sperm Counts Have Been Falling For Decades—Researchers Think Cell Phones Could Help Explain Why
- Sperm's Secret Voltage Switch: Scientists Unlock The Mystery Of Motility
- The First Babies Conceived With a Sperm-injecting Robot Have Been Born
- Sperm Counts Worldwide are Plummeting Faster Than Ever
- Is the Air We're Breathing Reducing Sperm Counts? Scientists Think So
Related Stories
Is the air we're breathing reducing sperm counts? Scientists think so:
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have shown how air pollution reduces sperm count in mice, by causing inflammation in the brain.
[...] The whole team of researchers, composed of Ying, Lianglin Qiu, Minjie Chen, Xiaoke Wang and Sufang Chen, tested healthy mice and mice bred without a marker of inflammation in the brain called Inhibitor Kappa B Kinase 2, or IKK2.
Exposing both healthy and IKK2 mutant mice to polluted air, they observed the effects and then tested their sperm counts.
The outcome was clear: the mice bred without the IKK2 inflammation marker in their neurons did not see any reduction in their sperm counts, unlike the healthy mice.
As a second step in the study, the researchers then removed IKK2 markers from specific neurons in order to determine more precisely how air pollution was leading to lower sperm counts.
They found that one specific kind of neuron typically associated with the sleep cycle and obesity was responsible for the reduced sperm count due to air pollution.
These neurons are typically found in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain which controls hunger, thirst, and sex drive.
The hypothalamus also works with the brain’s pituitary gland, which makes hormones that communicate directly with reproductive organs.
Journal Reference:
Lianglin Qiu, Minjie Chen, Xiaoke Wang, et al. PM2.5 Exposure of Mice during Spermatogenesis: A Role of Inhibitor κB Kinase 2 in Pro-Opiomelanocortin Neurons, Environmental Health Perspectives (DOI: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP8868)
Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than ever:
A 2022 meta-analysis found that sperm counts (the number of sperm per ejaculate) in humans have been dropping at an increasing rate in recent decades, reports National Geographic. A 2017 study found that sperm counts had "plummeted by more than 50 percent among men in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011." The newer study found that "not only has the decline in total sperm counts continued — reaching a drop of 62 percent — but the decline per year has doubled since 2000."
Shanna Swan, a reproductive and environmental epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, says the plummeting sperm counts could be attributed to multi-generational exposure to environmental chemicals.
From the study:
The initial study, published in July 2017, revealed that sperm counts—the number of sperm in a single ejaculate—plummeted by more than 50 percent among men in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011. Since then, a team led by the same researchers has explored what has happened in the last 10 years. In a new meta-analysis, which appears today in the journal Human Reproduction Update, researchers analyzed studies of semen samples published between 2014 and 2019 and added this to their previous data. The newer studies have a more global perspective and involved semen samples from 14,233 men, including some from South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. The upshot: Not only has the decline in total sperm counts continued—reaching a drop of 62 percent—but the decline per year has doubled since 2000.
[...] Contrary to common perception, infertility impacts men and women equally, says Amy E.T. Sparks, a reproductive physiologist and director of the IVF and Andrology Laboratories at the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Reproductive Health. "I think the perception that infertility is primarily a woman's problem may be due to the tendency for women to initially seek medical care for infertility rather than men." In the scientific community, the prevailing view is that male and female fertility challenges are each responsible for about one-third of infertility cases; the remaining cases are due to a combination of male and female factors.
Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine:
Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.
Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.
The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."
[...] The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.
[...] The main goal of automating IVF, say entrepreneurs, is simple: it's to make a lot more babies. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don't have access to fertility medicine or can't pay for it.
"How do we go from half a million babies a year to 30 million?'" wonders David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund. "You can't if you run each lab like a bespoke, artisanal kitchen, and that is the challenge facing IVF. It's been 40 years of outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering."
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Researchers at Stockholm University have unveiled the hidden intricacies of how sperm go from passive bystanders to dynamic swimmers. This transformation is a pivotal step in the journey to fertilization, and it hinges on the activation of a unique ion transporter. Their research has been published in Nature.
Imagine sperm as tiny adventurers on a quest to reach the ultimate treasure, the egg. They don't have a map, but they make use of something even more extraordinary: chemo-attractants. These are chemical signals released by the egg that act as siren call, directing and activating the sperm. When these signals bind to receptors on the sperm's surface, it triggers a series of events, starting their movement towards the egg. And in this intricate scenario, one key player is a protein known as "SLC9C1."
It's exclusively found in sperm cells, and it is usually not active. However, when the chemo-attractants interact with the sperm's surface, everything changes.
[...] The activation of SLC9C1 is driven by a change in voltage that occurs when chemo-attractants attach to the sperm. To accomplish this, SLC9C1 uses a unique feature called a voltage-sensing domain (VSD). Typically, VSD domains are associated with voltage-gated ion channels. But in the case of SLC9C1, it's something truly exceptional in the realm of transporters.
Researchers, led by David Drew, have unveiled the secrets behind SLC9C1's inner workings and provides the first example of voltage-sensing domain activation of a transporter and its connection via an unusually long voltage-sensing (S4) helix.
[...] "Transporters work very differently than channels and, as such, the VSD is coupled to the sperm protein in a way that we have just never seen before, or even imagined. Its exciting to see how nature has done this and perhaps, in the future, we can learn from this to make synthetic proteins that can be turned-on by voltage or develop novel male contraceptives that work by blocking this protein," David Drew notes.
Journal Reference:
Yeo, H., Mehta, V., Gulati, A. et al. Structure and electromechanical coupling of a voltage-gated Na+/H+ exchanger. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06518-2
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday November 05 2023, @06:06PM (13 children)
My parents generation are, probably, the last to have a realistically non-polluted 'youth'.
The industrial revolution did pollute things up a bit, but with the rise of plastics and toxic and 'forever' chemicals and nucleics'(?), etc etc etc.....
My generation grew up with a more polluted environment and my kids are screwed. THEIR kids are fucked totally.
With all this pollution in the environment; in the soil, in the food you eat and the water/fluids you drink, the air you breathe; you're going to nail it down to phone use?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 05 2023, @06:21PM (7 children)
In college, as (mild) eco-activists, my parents studied the effects of high voltage power transmission lines, results inconclusive but not leaning towards no effect.
Then the boomers bought a house with my bedroom in the corner closest to an intersection of two sets of high power transmission lines. My (mercury vapor filled) fluorescent desk lamp faintly glowed even when it was unplugged. That's o.k. the urban light pollution coming in the window was brighter.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sgleysti on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:05PM (6 children)
I'm surprised the field gradient was that high. Fortunately, the wavelength of 50Hz or 60Hz is crazy long and unlikely to couple efficiently to anything the size of a human, much less one of our organs. I'd be more concerned about a line falling down or a ground fault.
Regarding the summary's apparent conclusion, I wonder how they disambiguate cause and effect. Maybe the same common cause that lowers sperm count also results in behavioral changes that make people more likely to use their phones more... Granted, that's a stretch.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2023, @10:23PM (1 child)
Except you are ignoring the effects of both the field gradient on biochemical reactions and a moderately strong magnetic field that is flipping at 50 or 60 times a second. Look up electrophoresis if you really think an electric field is going to have no effect.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sgleysti on Sunday November 05 2023, @11:19PM
I meant the electric field gradient. The point of high voltage lines is to keep the current low. I doubt the magnetic field is all that high compared to the electric field.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday November 06 2023, @04:24AM
I had the exact same thought wrt cause vs effect. Or that they're chasing the wrong leg of the argument.
Gad Saad did some interesting research that boiled down to: doing masculine things that show one off as being masculine (eg. driving a muscle car where you can be seen doing so) makes testosterone levels rise. it reasonably follows that doing anti-masculine things, like the navel-gazing inherent in cellphone addiction, would have the inverse effect.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 06 2023, @02:02PM (2 children)
One might find, for example, an increase in the number of ions in the vicinity of HV lines owing to (almost) electrostatic effects. Free radicals and small particulates are not terribly good news for health.
Having noted that, it is also worth noting that studies on health impacts of industrial infrastructure are hard to do because there is typically a socio-economic correlation between infrastructure that makes a tricky systematic error. I.e. poor people live near power lines and poor people have crap health (for various reasons).
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday November 06 2023, @05:54PM (1 child)
Oh, like extra ozone due to corona discharge or something. That makes sense.
Yeah, the real world doesn't typically offer conditions for a clean control group...
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 06 2023, @06:19PM
> Yeah, the real world doesn't typically offer conditions for a clean control group...
Indeed, and the papers always subtract out systematic effects, without saying how they did it, and without quoting the magnitude of the subtraction (or worse, they just ignore them altogether).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Sunday November 05 2023, @06:26PM (2 children)
I know that what you speak of is the media narrative. Everyone should live indoors with filters for air and water on the way in and filters for air and water on the way out.
"Forever chemicals" are nothing new. What is new is that we can test for all of this and blast this "maybe" news to the masses for clicks super quickly. If we can whittle them down, lets do it, but remember, folks would prefer "forever chemicals" than to be forever set back into the stone age.
For the rest of us that have had it listening to how "its the end of the world as we know it and we're all going to die", the only part they have right is that "we're all going to die" one day.
For me, I'm just happy the sun came up and that my kids are going to inherit the world after me. Tea anybody?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday November 05 2023, @07:20PM (1 child)
RichWhich folks you hang with?You don't have to go back to the stone age to get away from "forever chemicals". You just have to stop using them and do with less. Not too long ago, plastic was rare: jumping back to that time would be a good start.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Monday November 06 2023, @12:26AM
A bunch of firefighters. They're good guys, but they're real sensitive about PFAS's.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday November 05 2023, @08:20PM
Sorry, son, but you're 100% incorrect. I'm 71, and before the EPA you had to roll the windows up driving past Monsanto or the air would burn your lungs, even on a 95 degree day, and cars didn't have air conditioning then. The transformer oil in the big transformers on the poles had potent carcinogens that killed almost all electrical linemen. Farther back in history, you have heard of the mad hatter; hat makers in the 18th and 19th century suffered from the chemicals they used. Photographers aged and died young. The fact is, before about 1970 nobody in industry or politics anywhere in the world gave a flying fuck about poisoning you, if they even had a clue.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 06 2023, @03:33AM
Unless they're pre-lead (a few thousand BC), they aren't.
And yet, you and your kids probably live in a much less polluted environment than the 1950s. What's missed here is that scary/dangerous pollution today is far less scary/dangerous than it was back then. What we lose in real world risk, we make up for with hyperventilating fantasies.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday November 05 2023, @06:10PM (1 child)
among sperms. They're all staring at their screens and doing Facebook instead of doing their job of fertilizing eggs.
Not to mention, millions of cellphones really hurt inside my balls.
(Score: 5, Funny) by acid andy on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:02PM
Set to vibrate?
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday November 05 2023, @08:03PM (4 children)
Do you keep your phone next to your balls? That should have been a fairly recent thing then since well phones suitable to have next to your balls have not really been around for 50 years, mobile phones have not really been available for 50 years. So it will probably be somewhat far fetched to blame it for the entire decline.
The "mobile phones" from the 70-80's that were the size of a luggage and with the car-battery that followed wasn't really something you had next to your balls. Ball-sized-pocket-phones didn't really become a thing I guess until the late 90's, most of the really modern once have not been around for more then say 15 years. The iphone and all the clones came about, or was released, in like 2007 or somewhere around there.
It could be part of the problem. But I doubt it's the main culprit. All the plastics and stuff is probably more to blame. But to be safe we should just ditch all cell phones. For the future of mankind! More balls, less 5G!
Do I keep my phone next to my balls? Not really. If I have it on my person it's usually in a chest-level-pocket. So that probably explains some other disease then.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday November 05 2023, @08:26PM (1 child)
Agreed, correlation does not imply causation, and I fail to see any way radio waves could alter sperm count. If that were the case, people who worked in high power radio transmitters would all be childless. It sounds pretty silly to me
You know what else? When I was young there were no man boobs, and I don't see how cell phones could cause that, either.
Perhaps something shown to affect living tissue, like CHEMICALS? Plastics, perhaps? More plastic was produced in the first decade of this century than all of history before.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:05PM
Correlation gives a target for a testable hypothesis that explains the possible causation by a rational and testable mechanism.
E.g: Birth rate in Sweden correlates with the stork population in Finland.
Hypothesis: Storks bring babies.
Test experiment: confine pregnant women in Sweden in stork- and baby-proof enclosures until a baby appears without stork involvement. A small-enough mesh should work, with 'airlock' style doors. You need only one counter-example.
If no-one is giving a plausible hypothetical mechanism, it's junk. Not even junk science, but junk.
I strongly recommend this web-site for amusement. Have fun generating hypotheses. Tyler Vigen: Spurious Correlations [tylervigen.com] (Anything posted on there is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.)
There's another we-site somewhere that allows you to choose sets of disparate statistics from a large selection, but I can't find it at the moment. There's also a great web-page at Autodesk, show why looking solely at correlation coefficients, and not the data behind the statistics can be a Very Bad Idea. Autodesk: Find the dinosaur data [autodesk.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:04PM
That doesn't actually seem to be the problem, though it's hard to tell. The figures were for the amount of use of cell phones and IIUC, where you carried them was insignificant. To me this implies that it's a correlation with some unmeasured thing. Perhaps with the amount of time sitting. (That actually makes sense, as that tends to keep your balls warmer than walking around does, and they're located where they are so that they'll stay cooler than mean body temperature.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2023, @12:44AM
Do I place my phone close to my nuts?
Pretty close...
Usually the right trouser pocket.
(Score: 5, Funny) by inertnet on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:36PM (3 children)
Meticulously counting sperm may impact your mobile phone use.
More so if you have named them individually:
Jack? Here!
John? Present!
Hank? Yo!
Herb? ...
Went premature again, did he?
(Score: 1) by cereal_burpist on Monday November 06 2023, @04:09AM (2 children)
The alpha sperm is named "Vlad the Impregnater"
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday November 06 2023, @09:46AM (1 child)
And the breathless one is "Dick the Inhaler"
(Score: 1) by cereal_burpist on Tuesday November 07 2023, @02:52AM
RIP MDC.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Sunday November 05 2023, @09:52PM
The article doesn't link or reference the study. We all know CNN isn't a legitimate news site, but they should at least make an effort.
I'll bet that the study, if it exists, is correlational, which means it's worth shit. Like many, many things, cell phone use is correlated with many, many other things that could be correlated low sperm count.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 05 2023, @10:48PM (1 child)
OK, cell phone usage correlates with reduced sperm cell count.
Now, what about brain cell count? People without cell phones do stupid things like walking into traffic far less frequently than people with cell phones. I hypothesize that brain cells are being damaged by cell phone usage.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Disagree) by crafoo on Monday November 06 2023, @12:23AM
right. it could be that high-use of cell phones by males correlates to another behavior that reduces sperm count. it's not the cell phone doing it.
maybe men that use their cell phones often are also men that engage in modernity. live within cities. eat fast food. don't cook often, but when they do it's with highly processed ingredients. they drink from municipal water supplies within cities. they're breathing city air. they're working in an office being nagged at by diversity-hires. they're vaping and using axe body spray. they're not working out. they're fat. they're buying into global liberal values, proven to cause brain damage.