That cell-phone in his pocket could cause male infertility
Natalee Roan
September 22nd, 2008A new study shows that men who keep their cell-phones in their pocket while talking when using a hands-free headset are at higher risk for male infertility, and possibly testicular cancer.
Web MD reports that men who use these hands-free devices tend to carry their cell phones in their pants pocket or clipped to their belts at the waist while in talk mode. As a result, they may be exposing their testicles to damaging radio frequency electromagnetic waves, explains Ashok Agarwal, PhD, head of the andrology laboratory and the director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Glickman Urologoical and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
The Bluetooth devices, which many people are using these days because of health or safety concerns, may not be always so safe. There is a downside," he says.
To arrive at their findings, researchers collected semen samples from 32 men and divided each man's sample into two parts. They placed half of the semen samples 2.5 centimeters away from a 850 MHz frequency cell phone in talk mode for one hour. Most cell phones used in the U.S. are 850-900 MHz. They chose this distance because it is the typical distance between the testes and the trouser pockets.
In further news, the debate about cell-phones and brain cancer continues. CNN reports that Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, issued a warning in a memo to 3,000 faculty and staff, urging people to spend less time talking on their cell-phones. CNN states that “Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science, and he believes that people should take action now, especially when it comes to children."
The FDA still states that cell-phones are safe and multiple studies offer inconclusive results. Remember when smoking was considered just fine for your health too? If you'd prefer not to be one of millions of guinea pigs, keep the phone away from your body when talking, even when using a Bluetooth device. Children - including young teens - should only use a cell-phone in the case of an emergency as their brains are still developing.
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It's the strongest warning
It's the strongest warning yet - John Aitken, a well-known fertility researcher, is advising men who want to have children not to keep active mobile phones below their waists. This issue, he says, "deserves our immediate attention."Aitken's research group at the University of Newcastle in Australia has found that human sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation (1.8 GHz) for 16 hours had reduced vitality and motility, two key indices of fertility. Notably, he has also confirmed his own previous study, published in 2005, which showed that RF radiation could lead to DNA damage. In that earlier experiment, he had exposed mice to 900 MHz signals and then looked at the animals' sperm, in contrast to the new study in which he exposed semen collected from human volunteers.The new data show striking dose responses for all three effects over a wide range of SARs —above 0.4 W/Kg and up to 27.5 W/Kg. The changes in motility and vitality became statistically significant at 1 W/Kg and the DNA damage at 2.8 W/Kg. In all cases, the statistical reliability of the effects became much more significant with higher SARs. These new results appear in a paper published on July 31 in PLoS ONE, a Web-based, peer-reviewed journal. All Public Library of Science journals offer free access to all."After 16 hours exposure, there was clear evidence of DNA damage," Aitken said at a fertility conference in Brisbane last fall when he first presented these findings. Aitken is the director of the Australian Research Council's Center of Excellence in Biotechnology and Development."Several independent lines of evidence suggest that RF-EMR has the potential to influence semen quality and could be an important contributor to DNA damage in the male germ line," Aitken told Microwave News. He said that he would like to see more studies done, especially ones with the statistical power to determine whether RF can indeed affect male fertility.In an interview published last month, Martine Hours, the chief science advisor to the French RF research program, also called for more fertility studies.Importantly, Aitken also demonstrates a "potential causative mechanism" as to how RF radiation can lead to DNA damage. He acknowledges that cell phone signals do not have enough energy to directly break chemical bonds, but, he goes on, "[T]his form of radiation may have other effects on larger scale systems such as cells and organelles, which stem from the perturbation of charged molecules and the disruption of electron flow." Specifically he believes that the RF can cause leakage of electrons from the mitochondria and produce reactive oxygen species (ROS), which in turn can attack DNA. This process, he states, is unrelated to thermal stress.Over a decade ago in a follow-up to their landmark 1995 study which showed that RF radiation can lead to DNA breaks in the brains of exposed rats, Henry Lai and N.P. Singh showed that the DNA breaks were caused by free radicals. (For more on EMFs and DNA damage, see the recent review by Lai, Singh and Jerry Phillips of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.)Aitken found an analogous dose-response relationship for the production of free radicals with increasing SAR —a highly significant one— to the ones for motility, vitality and DNA damage. "[T]he profiles of all the observed effects with respect to SAR were intriguingly similar, suggesting a common underlying mechanism," Aitken writes.Another of Aitken's results may also be quite meaningful: Only a subset of the sperm cells was vulnerable to RF-induced oxidative stress. "[A]ll of the responses examined showed an extremely rapid change at low SAR exposures that then reached a plateau at a point where around 30% of the sperm population was affected," Aitken reports, but he is quick to add, "[T]his does not mean that a majority of spermatozoa would not, ultimately, be affected by RF-EMR in vivo." It might well depend on the duration of the exposure, he says.These new results from Australia are consistent with those of Ashok Agarwal and coworkers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. In a paper published last year in Fertility and Sterility, Agarwal also reported decreases in sperm motility and viability and increases in ROS in human semen. He concluded, "[K]eeping [a] cell phone in a trouser pocket in talk mode may negatively affect spermatozoa and impair male fertility." Yet, in a subsequent interview with Newsweek, when he was asked where he kept his phone, Agarwal replied: "In my pants pocket." Because, he explained, he does not use a hands-free set (the phone is on standby, not talk mode, there, resulting in less exposure). And because "I already have two children."
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Very interesting article. I
Very interesting article. I have heard that mobile phones could cause male infertility but I do not know it is true. I think that there are more dangerous things than mobile phones like smoking or alcohol. If we believe that it is dangerous we can do not keep our phones in the pocket and everything would be great I think. Anyway thanks for the interesting article.
Regards,
Lenny Miterson from mobile application development
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Could it be the heat from the cell phone? Could it be from the stress in the lives of those who happen to use their cell phone more?
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The only way to get a clearer picture would be for scientists to carry out a study which was carefully designed only to look at the effect of mobile phones on sperm.
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