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Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

rbmojournal.com

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Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#61

Post by digikata »

dekhn wrote: post #24
yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

I can't critique the article directly, since it's behind a paywall. But I can take the purported results and do some Bayesian analysis with it. Take first a prior - due to my knowledge of physics, my prior on microwave/RF/visual radiation having any biological effect is 10^{-5}. Multiphoton ionization has simply never been observed to happen except under extremely intense (read: it'll melt you) fields and there are s…

Like many people, you're starting from assumption of the mechanism (ionization) and ignoring the fact that there are many other known physical mechanisms that are plausible. Also, if people detect a reliable signal without a plausible physical mechanism, best thing to do is determine what the cause of the signal is- rather than just assuming it's impossible. In grad school we were taught to do "back of the envelope"…

Assume some model, and do calculations within that model to tell you what the probability of some event is under that model.

What is just about impossible to calculate is what the probability is that the model captures only way for X event to occur. I find people sometimes confuse the reliability of calculations within the model as a defense of the model itself - usually unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally (with industries defending the safety of some practice...).

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#62

Post by nitrogen »

maxerickson wrote: post #46
yummyfajitas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - I'm charitably assuming that their study supported causality with p=0.02. In reality it doesn't.

My statement above but you are imputing the proposal of a causative radiation mechanism. is poorly phrased. A better way to put what I was getting at is that they are not claiming that radiation effects are the only possible causative mechanism. They found some observation in some data and published it, probably in the service of a future grant proposal. Saying they didn't prove anything for this publication is like…

Isn't it the case that we can expect roughly one in fifty studies with p<0.02 to be the result of statistical noise?

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#63

Post by tomp »

Hm... judging by the cover, this looks like absolute crap.

> Some studies have shown a continuous decline in semen quality since the beginning of the 20th century.

Studies also indicate a continuous decline in testosterone (in males) over 20th century. I'd welcome someone correct my biological knowledge, but I would guess that testosterone influences production of sperm, not the other way round. So they're probably studying the wrong thing.

> One postulated contributing factor is radio frequency electromagnetic radiation emitted from cell phones.

So... how do you then explain the decline from 1900 until 1990?!?

> Questionnaires accessing demographic data and characteristics of cell phone usage were completed by 106 men

Trying to do statistics on a small, ...

> referred for semen analysis

... biased sample, seriously?!

I'm too paranoidly afraid of the negative effects of radiation, but even I'm inclined to call bullshit on this study.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#64

Post by lvs »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

I can't critique the article directly, since it's behind a paywall. But I can take the purported results and do some Bayesian analysis with it. Take first a prior - due to my knowledge of physics, my prior on microwave/RF/visual radiation having any biological effect is 10^{-5}. Multiphoton ionization has simply never been observed to happen except under extremely intense (read: it'll melt you) fields and there are s…

The article may be hogwash, but this "analysis" was worse.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#65

Post by nickpsecurity »

tokenadult wrote: post #54
yummyfajitas wrote: post #20

I can't critique the article directly, since it's behind a paywall. But I can take the purported results and do some Bayesian analysis with it. Take first a prior - due to my knowledge of physics, my prior on microwave/RF/visual radiation having any biological effect is 10^{-5}. Multiphoton ionization has simply never been observed to happen except under extremely intense (read: it'll melt you) fields and there are s…

Thanks for this helpful comment. The back-and-forth that is going on in the subthread below your comment illustrates the difference between "evidence-based medicine" (medicine studied through randomized, controlled trials, which by the way we don't have here) and "science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science). Sc…

""science-based medicine" (medicine studied not just through randomized, controlled trials but also through careful consideration of fundamental science)."

Medical science seems like it's wrong as much as it's right. Careful experiments are how we learned most of what we learned that's useful. Science can certainly inform those experiments. Yet, the solution to the problems of evidence-based medicine is usually better evidence gathering and review. Filters out the major issue of scientists own models or assumptions screwing up their results because they didn't reflect reality. Fixing that can take a long time, too, depending on the sub-field.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#66

Post by snowwrestler »

dekhn wrote: post #56
snowwrestler wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible for an epidemiology study to elimate hidden factors, no matter how many statistical tests they run. Hidden factors are hidden, which means the statistics can't tell you about them. Information not available to the researchers cannot be evaluated by the researchers. This is why the concept of a mechanism is important in science--it provides a framework for simplified experiments that exclude hidden fa…

Like I said, a carefully designed study can eliminate many biases. I didn't claim it could eliminate hidden factors. Anyway the problem with finding something in an epi study then trying to reproduce it in a minimal environment (isolated cells exposed directly to radiation) is unlikely to uncover any complex mechanism. Cells on their own don't behave like tissue, and tissue on its own doesn't behave like an organism.

Even doing radiation tests on rats in a lab is going to have fewer confounding factors than 100 infertile human guys filling out a questionnaire.

I'm not aware of any lab rat studies that found harm from cell phone radiation. And of course the basic mechanism by which radiation affects materials is pretty well understood.

All this is to say: I think yummfajitas had it right. Fajitas are delicious.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#67

Post by snowwrestler »

dekhn wrote: post #42
yummyfajitas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I'm making assumptions - the biggest one is that quantum chemistry works. If you are now retreating to thermal effects, they a) can be easily measured and b) are vastly smaller than effects like wearing tighty whities or walking past a radiator in winter. Is your sole claim that using a cell phone might have an effect 1/100th as large as blow drying one's balls after a shower? Let me reason by analogy, to e…

No, my sole claim is not that using a cell phone would have 1/100th the effect of blow drying ones testicles after a shower (why????) After all, the phone stays around a lot longer (temporal effect) and I have certainly noticed that when the phone is using lots of bandwidth it stays warm for hours at a time. Many effects in biology can occur from extended exposure (cumulative dosage effects) when they don't have an e…

It's fine for researchers to go look for other causes. It's not fine to expect that they will disregard what we already know. Well-supported scientific theories should be used to constrain the search space when addressing new problems, otherwise we'll get stuck re-proving the same basic things over and over again.

If every epidemiological study causes us to question everything we thought we knew, it's going to be hard to make any progress on health improvements. This is certainly not the first study to find health correlations with cell phones, and it won't be the last.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#68

Post by nickpsecurity »

drostie wrote: post #57
yummyfajitas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but this study (or the effect it measured) is vastly too small for us to significantly raise our prior estimate of an effect. There is consensus (among physicists who know QM) that non-thermal effects of RF radiation on the body are negligible. Simple calculations and easy experiments show that thermal effects are tiny, vastly smaller than turning up the thermostat by one degree or walking out in the sun…

Speaking as a physicist who knows QM, this is almost-correct. More precisely, the chemical effects of microwave photons are restricted to being the sort of effects that routinely happen within your body all the time due to the thermal jiggle of atoms. Obviously this is not "nothing", because your body does a lot of cool stuff with all of that jiggling. Obviously, chemical effects can also happen due to accumulated el…

"These effects do exist -- witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue."

I liked the comment in the beginning but it's problematic here. I come from a system engineering background with some knowledge on hardware side. For our chips, the effects of an electrical surge are totally different than the effects of electromagnetic radiation. The interface point and nature of materials make them respond differently to each. The machinery of the human body might do the same thing. I cited the Frey effect as an example of non-melting-point effects in a previous comment.

Also, I found something very interesting about your claim to support my hypothetical parallel between chips and the bodies. Let me show you instead of trying to explain it:

"witness what tasers do to people, or what a 9V battery feels like on the tongue -- but nobody really reports these feelings when holding a transmitting cell phone near their tongue."

Witness what a surge does to the CPU or how dropping an electricity source onto its I/O pins results in detectable activity. Yet, no users or monitor software reports detecting something like this when you hold a cellphone next to it.

Your claim would be true and readers would think cellphones/radiation had no effect on computers. Yet, they actually do have an effect that ranges from undetectable leaks to failures of the system from components made faulty due to long exposure. In later case, users not aware of attacks believe the components were faulty for other reasons. Here's a nice timeline on the leak side:

https://cryptome.org/0001/tempest-time.htm

Matter of fact, they banned cellphones in secure facilities because bringing certain ones within 20 or so ft of a secure phone compromised it. The background radiation of the phone bounced off the inside of the chip in a way that was modified by the circuits holding the master key. What bounced out could be caught, analyzed, and keys re-assembled. All conversations compromised without anyone ever knowing. Just because you walked in with a cellphone on your waste.

But, "nobody really reports these [compromises] when holding a transmitting cell phone near their [computer]."

;) What do you think of that parallel? Something to it possibly or just a fun thought experiment?

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#69

Post by nickpsecurity »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #29
facepalm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe somebody could create an app for that, somehow optimize the radiation for killing sperms...

There is research on ultrasound devices which do what you're asking. Designed to work as short-medium term contraceptives[0]. That isn't how smartphones kill sperm however, just as an aside for getting the same-ish results. [0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/scientists-zap-sperm-counts-with...

Thanks for that link. Interesting. There's also the evidence... which needs more corroboration to be sure... that heat above a certain temperature kills them or weakens them. Small scale experiments and survey of blast-furnace workers provided evidence for it. With both, the fertility went back to normal I think a few months after they left the environment where they were overheated.

So, initial evidence for sperm-killing heat to be a safe and effective contraceptive. Doesn't feel as bad as you'd think, either.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#70

Post by airza »

tomp wrote: post #63

Hm... judging by the cover, this looks like absolute crap. > Some studies have shown a continuous decline in semen quality since the beginning of the 20th century. Studies also indicate a continuous decline in testosterone (in males) over 20th century. I'd welcome someone correct my biological knowledge, but I would guess that testosterone influences production of sperm, not the other way round. So they're probably s…

The authors note that it is a contributing factor, which means it is not the only factor.

I'm not really sure why people referred for semen analysis would be a biasing factor in this when it is present in both test groups. It seems like it would be the only reasonable way to get statistical power in a study like this since if the effect is small and most people don't suffer from it there would be a much larger sample size required.

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