Sperm Really Is Frazzled by Modern Life, Scientists Say

Modern life is affecting our bodies more than we realize. Everything from the air we breath to the food we eat has been shown to disrupt the delicate balance of our biology. One area that is particularly underappreciated is the impact of our lifestyles on male fertility.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), roughly one in six people around the world will experience infertility in their lifetime. Roughly 50 percent of individuals experiencing infertility are male.

“It has been shown that sperm concentration has been decreasing over the past 50 years in industrialized countries,” Rita Rahban, a senior researcher at the University of Geneva and Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicology, told Newsweek. “It dropped from around 100 million sperm per milliliter to around 50 million sperm per milliliter.”

There is some debate about the reliability of this figure due to differences in data collection between now and the 1970s, but there is ample evidence to suggest that modern life may be at least partially to blame for this trend.

“Decreased sperm quality can impact male fertility,” Melissa Perry, dean of the George Mason University College of Public Health, told Newsweek. “However, the severity of this impact varies among individuals. Factors like sperm concentration, motility, and morphology can affect fertility.”

Something that has changed since the 70s is our use of mobile phones. Therefore, Rahban and her team studied the associations between sperm quality and mobile phone use in a group of 2,886 young men in Switzerland aged between 18 and 22. The data was collected between 2005 and 2018 from six military conscription centers around the county and has been published in the journal Fertility and Sterility on October 31.

“We found that if men used their phones more often, the probability that they have lower sperm concentration is higher compared to men using it rarely,” Rahban said.

Specifically, those who used their mobile phones more than 20 times per day had a 30 percent higher risk of having a below reference sperm counts for fertile men, according to values set by the WHO. However, even among the men who used their phones frequently, the median sperm concentrations were still twice as high as the WHO’s reference value for infertility.

The main concern with mobile phone use is their emission of low frequency electromagnetic radiation, known as EMR.

“There are two hypotheses about how exposure to EMR through mobile phone can affect semen quality,” Rahban said. “One hypothesis is that the effect is direct and is due to a slight increase in the temperature of the testicles when the phone is placed in the pocket. Our data suggested that this effect is less probable since we don’t see any association between low semen quality and placing the phone in the pocket.

“The second hypothesis on the potential mechanism of action is indirect exposure through the brain of the hypothalamic-pituitary glands that regulates the testicular function. It is noteworthy to mention that most men in our study (85 percent) reported placing the phone in their pant pocket so this still needs further investigations.”

Rahban and her team are conducting additional studies to confirm whether the placing of the phone has any significant impact on sperm concentrations.

What did seem to have a significant impact, however, was the time at which the results were taken. Unfavorable sperm counts were much more strongly associated with mobile phone use at the start of the study—from 2005 to 2007—compared to at the end. The team believe that this trend reflects the transition from 2G to 3G and then 4G mobile phones.

“2G is less efficient than 4G in terms of data transfer speed, leading to an increase in exposure time (what you can download with 4G takes at least 2 more times if you are using 2G) and 2G is much less targeted, meaning one would be exposed to electromagnetic radiation even when they are not using their phones,” Rahban said.

“4G, or fourth-generation mobile networks, introduced significant improvements in data transfer speeds, enabling faster internet connectivity, multimedia streaming, and other data-intensive applications.”

Exactly what the impacts of 5G will be remain unclear, but Rahban said that newer generations of mobile technology, like 4G and 5G, aim to reduce radiation exposure while offering improved data speeds and capabilities.

Of course, even if you stay away from modern technology, there are other ways that your sperm count can be affected. Our world has become increasingly polluted, with knock on effects on our fertility.

One study in 2017 published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that air pollution can affect the size and shape of sperm, with effects on sperm quality and motility.

But smoggy air is not our only source of pollution. In a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on November 15, Perry and colleagues analyzed 25 studies from the last 50 years and found a clear association between insecticide exposure and low sperm concentrations in adult men.

“People can be exposed to insecticides through various routes such as food consumption (residues on fruits, vegetables, grains), contaminated water sources, occupational exposure (farmers, pesticide applicators), and through residential pest control at home,” Perry, who led the study, told Newsweek.

“This review is the most comprehensive review to date, sizing up more than 25 years of research on male fertility and reproductive health. The evidence available has reached a point that we must take regulatory action to reduce insecticide exposure.”

While we can opt for organic produce, Perry said that the use of insecticides and other pesticides is so ubiquitous that it is impossible to avoid them completely.

Luckily, low sperm counts caused by environmental factors can often be rectified. “Sperm are produced continuously in the testicles every 10 weeks,” Rahban said. “Men therefore renew their sperm storage quite frequently. This means that if men are trying to conceive and are aware that they don’t have a healthy lifestyle in general, they can take action and the effect is in many cases reversible.”