Is Wi-Fi Damaging Your Sperm?

How many men out there like to stretch out on the couch, crack open a beer and do a little internet browsing? Ladies, do you know any guys who fit this description? When they do, where do they place their laptop? One would assume that a majority of folks would answer that question with “his lap.”

Well, new research from the peer-reviewed publication Fertility and Sterility suggests that laptop internet browsing could be damaging sperm. And it appears that the Wi-Fi could be the culprit.

The study took semen samples from 29 healthy men in order to take a look at the effects of laptops using Wi-Fi on sperm. The divided the sperm from each subject into two groups. First, the experimental group was subjected to Wi-Fi-connected laptops for a period of four hours. The control group was kept in the same conditions, but without the laptop hovering over them.

What they found was that the Wi-Fi seemed to be affecting the sperm in a pretty alarming way.

While the sperm in the laptop-exposed group was not killed, it did show signs of both lost mobility and DNA fragmentation. Basically, the researchers witnessed that the experimental sperm group weren’t swimming much anymore, and many of the ones that were were damaged.

The laptop-exposed sperm lost mobility 11% more than the control group, and 9% showed DNA fragmentation, as opposed to just 3% of the control group.

The researchers suggest that keeping a Wi-Fi-connected laptop near the testes for extended periods of time could be harming sperm.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the direct impact of laptop use on human spermatozoa. Ex vivo exposure of human spermatozoa to a wireless internet-connected laptop decreased motility and induced DNA fragmentation by a nonthermal effect. We speculate that keeping a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility. Further in vitro and in vivo studies are needed to prove this contention.

Of course, some in the field are skeptical of these findings. The president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology told Reuters that while interesting, the study wasn’t biologically relevant; “This is not real-life biology, this is a completely artificial setting,” he said about the new study. “It is scientifically interesting, but to me it doesn’t have any human biological relevance.”

Still, this isn’t the first time that some sort of electromagnetic radiation has been linked to sperm problems. The long-believed position that cellphones, kept in pockets all day, damage sperm got more support in August when an Italian study found a link between Rf-EMR and decreased sperm count and mobility.

Despite how you feel about the accuracy of these studies, I’m sure I won’t be the only one that at least thinks about reevaluating the position in which I browse the web at home.