Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

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It feels like the author is confusing cancer with sperm count. So he spends half the article discussing how cell phone signals don't have the energy to cause DNA breakage and then cause cancer. But this is about sperm count. All you have to do to lower sperm count is increase the temperature. It's been shown that just bathing the balls in a bowl of hot water daily drastically reduces sperm count. So heat is definitely contrary to sperm production, and it isn't as tough to produce as DNA breakage. That said, there is no permanent damage. Sperm production resumes when the temperature returns to normal (which is below body temperature for the balls hanging out of the body).

It isn't many paragraphs into the article at all before the author writes, "First of all, let’s look at the central hypothesis, namely that cell phone radiation causes decreased sperm count and motility, both of which are associated with male factor infertility, for obvious reasons. There’s only one plausible biological mechanism (and, even then, it’s not so plausible) to explain how cell phone radiation might decrease sperm count and motility. After all, it’s well known that increased temperature is associated with decreased sperm count and quality. It’s the very reason that fertility doctors recommend that men being evaluated for infertility wear boxers instead of briefs."

He then goes on to investigate the plausibility of that claim in great detail and rejects it. You can follow the rest of the article as an example of how to read a medical study thoughtfully. (The author is a medical researcher who writes blog posts to educate the public on what medical research shows and what it doesn't show.) The conclusion is, "The bottom line is that cell phone usage as measured by a study like the Technion study is almost certainly a confounder, a surrogate for some other factor that is known to be related to infertility that the study doesn’t control for."

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