Here’s why I’m not worried about a recent report that cell phone use has been associated with low sperm count in men. A) I am a woman. B) I just spent a half hour on the phone with the first author of the report and he’s been fielding calls non-stop for the past two days on, you guessed it, a cell phone.
“I’m not giving up my cell phone,” says Ashok Agarwal, a reproductive biologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. Indeed, he’s probably going to have to get a new one since his cell phone stopped working this morning and he had to borrow someone else’s to talk to all the journalists from around the world who are calling him up. “Our study is not the final word,” Agarwal says. “But we were able to demonstrate some interesting findings.”
More specifically, Agarwal and his colleagues surveyed 364 men who were being evaluated at an infertility clinic in Mumbai, India. The researchers determined that those men who used their cell phones the most—four hours or more a day—had the lowest average sperm counts. A closer look also showed that fewer of the sperm were good swimmers and more of them appeared abnormal when compared to the sperm of the men who never used a cell phone.
But just because the scientists found a statistical association between heavy cell phone use and damaged sperm doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Heavy cell phone use may actually be a marker for something else that is known to affect sperm count—like sitting for long stretches or being overweight. Maybe people who use their cell phones a lot tend to be more stressed out than those who don’t.
The results, which were presented at a poster sessison of the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in New Orleans, are intriguing enough, however, that they’re worth pursuing. In the next few months, Agarwal hopes to sign up a couple hundred men at the Cleveland Clinic for further study.
In the meantime, says Dr. Peter Schlegel, a urologist and board member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, there’s no need to throw your cell phone away. (I also talked to him on his cell phone.) “I won’t be recommending a change of behavior for my patients,” Schlegel says. But any men who are really, really worried and want to play it absolutely safe, he notes, could just stop carrying their cell phones on their belt or in a pocket.
There are plenty of other reasons to spend less time on a cell phone, especially if you’re trying to have a baby.
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