New York (PTI): An Indian American fertility expert has warned men that keeping their cell phones in pockets and belts while talking on hands-free could affect their fertility.
In a study published September 19 in the online version of Journal of Fertility and Sterility, Ashok Agarwal, lead author, says men who keep their cell phones in their pockets or clip them to their belts while using an ear piece to chat may be compromising their sperms.
In an interview with Newsweek news magazine, he rejected the suggestion that the researchers have debunked the idea that use of cell phones leads to impotence.
"That's not true. We still have questions that haven't been answered. And there are still more questions to ask," he said, adding that his study was designed to examine whether exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic waves from cell phones would cause any kind of changes in human sperm.
An earlier study conducted on some 361 men, he said, had found a significant relationship between cell-phone use and sperm quality, especially among men who used mobiles for more than four hours per day. "We wanted to find out what was going on," he added.
The researchers, he said, took sperm samples from 23 healthy men, and from nine men with known fertility issues. The samples were then divided into two portions to make a control group and a test group.
"We exposed the test group sperm to a cell phone in "talk" mode with a radiation of 850 megahertz, the frequency most often used by cell phones in the US."
"We exposed the sperm for about one hour to see if there was any effect on the sperm quality in exposed and unexposed portions," he told Newsweek.
The researchers, he said, looked at several markers, including mobility, viability and cellular or molecular changes.
"There were 85 percent more free radicals generated by the exposed sperm samples in both healthy and infertile specimens versus the control group, and a 6 percent decrease in antioxidants in the exposed samples, the chemicals that fight free-radical damage", he said.
"Motility, or what proportion of sperm are moving, decreased by 7 percent, and the viability, or the percentage of sperm that is alive decreased by 11 percent.
"That was for both groups, the healthy men and men with fertility problems, as compared to a control group that had no exposure," he added.
Relying to a question, he said, the study is preliminary and the results need to be validated with a larger sample size.
"The next step is to obviously take a look at the muscles, fat and tissues that separate the testes from this exposure. We're building a very sophisticated computer model that will mimic real-time cell-phone use.
Essentially, we want to re-create with a computer model exactly how men use their cell phones and how it may affect their fertility," he added.
"Asked where he keeps his cell phone, Agarwal replied in his pant pocket. But he does not use a hand-free device. So the phone is a standby mode."
"We're not sure if a cell phone in standby mode could cause damage to sperm because we don't know for sure the minimum amount of radiation that may induce damage to sperm cells. There are a host of things that we don't know at this time, he said.
