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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

#11

Post by evils »

strebler wrote: post #6

Other studies show significantly decreased mobility and sperm quality as well (some in-vitro with microscope). Anecdotally, I'm quite confident this was a factor with our 2nd child. With our 1st, I didn't own a cell phone and he was conceived literally the first try. I bought a smart phone when he was 1, which I carried in my pocket. A few years later, we wanted another child - tried for 10 months with no results! Fr…

Fertility decreases with age, especially in women. That your second child took longer to conceive than the first is no evidence of anything and even less of the influence of cell phone ownership. You might just as well claim that having your first child decreased your fertility, or anything else that happened to you in between. (Bought a new car? A new TV? Different brand toothpaste?)

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#12

Post by maxerickson »

nxzero wrote: post #7

Not an expert on critical analysis of research, but seems like there's a bit of selection bias given the population studied wanted to reproduce and was referred to the study based on being unable to do so.

There could be an over-represented subgroup of the general population who are more susceptible to the cell phone radiation, but selecting from that group would not necessarily obscure the relationship between the amount of cell phone use and any resulting biological impact.

They don't go very far out on the limb, they say that it probably justifies a bigger study, which is pretty mild.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#13

Post by vasilipupkin »

nxzero wrote: post #7

Not an expert on critical analysis of research, but seems like there's a bit of selection bias given the population studied wanted to reproduce and was referred to the study based on being unable to do so.

yeah, beware researchers armed with regression analysis skills and poor sampling methodologies :)

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#15

Post by pc86 »

strebler wrote: post #6

Other studies show significantly decreased mobility and sperm quality as well (some in-vitro with microscope). Anecdotally, I'm quite confident this was a factor with our 2nd child. With our 1st, I didn't own a cell phone and he was conceived literally the first try. I bought a smart phone when he was 1, which I carried in my pocket. A few years later, we wanted another child - tried for 10 months with no results! Fr…

> I'm quite confident this was a factor with our 2nd child.

You have absolutely no way of knowing that - you're more likely to be wrong than right.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#16

Post by pc86 »

evils wrote: post #11
strebler wrote: post #6

Other studies show significantly decreased mobility and sperm quality as well (some in-vitro with microscope). Anecdotally, I'm quite confident this was a factor with our 2nd child. With our 1st, I didn't own a cell phone and he was conceived literally the first try. I bought a smart phone when he was 1, which I carried in my pocket. A few years later, we wanted another child - tried for 10 months with no results! Fr…

Fertility decreases with age, especially in women. That your second child took longer to conceive than the first is no evidence of anything and even less of the influence of cell phone ownership. You might just as well claim that having your first child decreased your fertility, or anything else that happened to you in between. (Bought a new car? A new TV? Different brand toothpaste?)

Crest is notorious for decreasing sperm motility. /s

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#17

Post by evils »

If I interpret the abstract correctly, the change in sperm they observed was only correlated to talking on a cell phone whilst charging it (that is, holding it next to your head), where keeping it right next to the groin did not show any significant influence?

That doesn't sound like a plausible outcome of radiation having any influence.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#19

Post by evils »

wwkeyboard wrote: post #4
ngold5 wrote: post #3

Would need to see the full article to find out the size of their sample, but their confidence intervals are quite tight for a study of this nature, and they add in the caveat of further research being needed. This should be a least a warning correlation for cell phone users, and will make me rethink some of my usage habits.

Or the 5th sentence of the abstract: > Questionnaires accessing demographic data and characteristics of cell phone usage were completed by 106 men referred for semen analysis And this article isn't recommending a change in behavior, only further study: > Investigation using large-scale studies is thus needed.

"Investigation using large-scale studies is thus needed."

Which would be the conclusion of pretty much any result that they could have had. I could have given you that recommendation even without conducting a study at all.

Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality

#20

Post by yummyfajitas »

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 strong theoretical reasons to believe it won't happen.

I.e., if this effect is real, it'll require new physics to explain. Most likely 10^{-5} is a conservative prior on the likelihood that an experimental paper overturns quantum mechanics.

Now, lets take their strongest result (p = 0.02) and do a Bayes update with it, assuming a complete absense of selection bias/etc (i.e. imagining this was a perfect RCT).

P(effect false | experiment result) = P(experiment result | effect false) P(effect false) / P(experiment result)

= 0.02 x (1-10^{-5}) / P(experiment result)

We can compute the latter as P(experiment result | effect false) x (1 - 10^{-5}) + P(experiment result | effect real) x 10^{-5} \approx 0.02 x 1.0. Assuming optimistically that the statistical power - aka P(experiment result | effect real) - is 0.99, the bottom is 0.020009700000000002.

Plugging and chugging yields:

P(effect false | experiment result) = 0.9995052399586201

Or equivalently P(effect real | experiment result) = 0.000494760041379938.

As a result, assuming you believe strongly in quantum physics (I do), this experiment provides wildly insufficient data to overturn QM and believe the effect is real.

Note: I'm not explaining here why quantum mechanics says multiphoton ionization is a tiny effect, negligible in biological applications, I'm just going to argue by authority: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/publications.html

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