Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 har…
"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."
I think QM showed this was pretty much not an acceptable position to take.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#73I 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…
"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." He we go again. The assumption that microwaves won't have biological effects because it…
That's not multiphoton ionization or any chemical effect at all. The microwave auditory effect is caused directly by inducing thermal expansion in the skull due to rapidly heating tissue from extremely intense microwave pulses. I've never disputed that a microwave oven can heat you up.
Microwave heating is also well understood. So the question now is "how much energy can be deposited into testicles from a cell phone?" This is an easy question to answer, either theoretically or experimentally. The answer is "not much".
As retric noted, it's far more likely that if any effect exists it's caused by the cell phone making your pants tighter.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 har…
"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." I think QM showed this was pretty much not an acceptable position to take.
The reason QM rejected existing classical theories is because various experiments were wildly inconsistent with classical theory. I.e., if you repeat photoelectric experiments enough times to rule out experimental error, you've pretty much refuted classical physics with p This study has p < 0.02. It makes an highly unlikely hypothesis about 50x more likely, i.e. still extremely unlikely.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#75Hm... 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…
Also isn't clear at all if they're accounting for multiple comparisons. Given they're looking at (glancing through they paper) at least seven or eight cell phone related factors, it'd be pretty crucial here.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#76Hm... 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…
> 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.
You're right, everything else being equal, that probably wouldn't be the biggest issue... Although in this specific case, it seems like a way to amplify the effect - if this study would be done on the general population, where (1) almost everybody uses mobile phones extensively, and (2) presumably, men are less likely to have poor sperm than in this focus group, the resulting effect would be diluted (as in most cases, mobile phone usage would not result in poorer sperm quality).
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
QM rules out non-thermal effects. Once you retreat to thermal effects you have conceded that a cell phone is vastly less dangerous than turning the thermostat from 74 to 75 (if you want to think about extended exposure) or blow drying one's balls (if you want to think about acute exposure). Now those things probably do have some measurable effect - certainly temperature effects sperm count, which is why men are advis…
For a layperson, like me. How does QM rule out non-thermal effects?
Some hypothetical causes you might refute:
Could resonance be involved? At the right frequency maybe it doesn't take much to shake things up.
In a similar manner, could precise timing interfering with som finley tuned process be an explanation.
Or, could something in the body detect it, and respond excessively? Like how we get stressed from noise, even though the auditory system filters it out.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." He we go again. The assumption that microwaves won't have biological effects because it…
That's not multiphoton ionization or any chemical effect at all. The microwave auditory effect is caused directly by inducing thermal expansion in the skull due to rapidly heating tissue from extremely intense microwave pulses. I've never disputed that a microwave oven can heat you up. Microwave heating is also well understood. So the question now is "how much energy can be deposited into testicles from a cell phone?…
No, the question is, "Can heat cause any effects on any aspect of our machinery for sperm production or maintenance that reduce sperm quality? Or the same for the sperm itself?" See how that broadens one's perspective above "Can heat produced by X microwave energy do damage with Y effect?"
This is what I'm talking about with assumptions making people think too narrow. You know enough about one phenomenon that you're casting the entire problem in that light. This may turn out to be justified here but it's also one of top sources of scientific mistakes or delays in understanding. So, I have to call it immediately as an unnecessary risk to force people to clarify their own position and make their own assumptions explicit.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of biology is too limited to help past noticing you were dismissing a broad phenomenon or range of possibility based on a narrow set of data or theory. A pattern that exists in many claims that are dismissed later. I wish I could do more than spot the problem here as it's an important research area. But I'm out of my depth if we start talking the molecular or cellular machinery itself. (shrugs)
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#79I think you can pretty much reproduce their study from the percentages with the following table (they claim 26 of the 106 did not meet study eligibility criteria, but the total seems to be 79? but then the total isn't consistent between the two categories; I didn't read carefully enough to see if the discrepancy is explained)
categories abnormal semen (n=34) normal semen (n=45)
talk >1h 14 9
Of course, it would be nice if they treated hours talking on phone as a continuous variable instead of a discrete 1h. With the freedom to set that boundary (if they had that), it would reduce the associated p-value.
Either way, it's very unlikely that the cause is RF radiation and not some confounding variable. Radiation damage is pretty much excluded, and I don't think there can be any effect on the impulses of the nervous system, which I think operates in the kHz, very far away from the 800 MHz+ from cell phones.
Talking while charging seems very unlikely to be related to any radiation, but might be associated with talking while driving or a sedentary lifestyle or something like that.
Re: Habits of cell phone usage and sperm quality
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
As dramatized at https://xkcd.com/882/