Male Health

I gave a radio interview to Outside the Loop Radio discussing some of the topics that I recently discussed on this blog. For those interested, you can hear the interview here.

Are cell phones bad for sperm? They emit electromagnetic radiation, and some have questioned whether that may be harmful for sperm.

Researchers exposed sperm in a test tube to the typical 850 and 900 MHz frequencies of cell phone transmitters and found that its movement worsened, its inner cell life decayed, and bad reactive oxygen molecules that are thought to damage sperm increased.

But a man doesn’t commonly hold his sperm up against his cell phone’s transmitter, and there’s a lot of distance and stuff between his cell phone and his sperm. So what’s the information about cell phones and sperm in real life?

In a study of sailors in the Norwegian navy, men who were exposed to high power military equipment transmitting radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation had problems with infertility. The higher the exposure, the worse the infertility, which argues that the electromagnetic radiation was the factor damaging a man’s reproductive chances. (An interesting observation in the study was that higher exposure resulted in less boys and more girls at birth.) But the high power electromagnetic radiation in that study is still not quite real life use of a cell phone for a typical man.

In another study of men going to a fertility clinic, researchers divided them into four groups based on how much time they spent talking on a cell phone each day: none; less than two hours per day; two to four hours per day; and greater than four hours per day. As talk time went up, sperm count, motility, inner sperm cell life, and the number of normally shaped sperm went down.

Should men stay away from using cell phones to protect their sperm? The pieces of the puzzle aren’t enough to make a blanket recommendation like that yet. But in the meantime, it’s probably a good idea not to go wild on the cell phone if a man is trying to impregnate his partner.