• Home
• Healthcare
• News Article

Too much mobile phone use bad for male hormones

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Gulf News

Dubai Men who plan on fathering children may want to think twice about spending lengthy periods talking on their mobile phones, say Canadian researchers. A new study suggests that men who use mobile phones may be susceptible to decreased fertility and lower sperm quality when exposed to electromagnetic waves emanating from the devices.

The emerging findings may be of particular importance for countries such as the UAE where mobile phone penetration is said to hover around 200 per cent or roughly two handheld devices for each resident of the population.

Rany Shamloul, a lead researcher of the project at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said men who have been advised they have low sperm counts may want to consider limiting time on their mobile phones if they want children. “Our findings were a little bit puzzling,” said Shamloul, a post doctoral fellow at Queen’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

“We were expecting to find different results but the results we did find suggest there would be some intriguing mechanisms at work.”

The study, published in the journal Andrologia, monitored 2,110 men from 1993 until October 2007 at an infertility facility in Austria, splitting the test subjects into two groups; men who used cell phones and men who didn’t.

In the study summary posted in the online March 28 issue of Andrologia, researchers said, “Significant difference was observed in sperm morphology between the two groups. Patients with cell phone usage showed significantly higher T [testosterone] and lower LH [luteinising hormone] than those who did not use cell phones.”

Researchers said the evidence was clear. “Our results showed that cell phone use negatively affects sperm quality in men,” the summary stated. “Further studies with a careful design are needed to determine the effect of cell phone use on male fertility.”

According to a statement issued by Queen’s University, luteinizing hormone is “an important reproductive hormone that is secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain.

“The researchers hyp-othesise that electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones may have a dual action on male hormone levels and fertility. EMW may increase the number of cells in the testes that produce testosterone; however, by lowering the levels of LH excreted by the pituitary gland, EMW may also block the conversion of this basic circulating type of testosterone to the more active potent form of testosterone associated with sperm production and fertility.”

The university reiterated its researchers’ caveat that more “in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.” Studies to date show no ill effects.

By Derek Baldwin?Business Features Reporter

© Gulf News 2011. All rights reserved.