Study finds that making pocket calls won’t stop you having children

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This study examined the relationship between men who carried a mobile phone in their pocket and fecundability in two prospective preconception cohort studies. The study included 751 men in Denmark and 2349 men in North America whose phone habits and conception outcomes were followed from 2012 to 2020. Mobile phone exposure was assessed by survey and included information about the number of hours the phone was on and carried in the pocket and the pocket location (e.g. back, front, shirt pocket, etc.). The authors also conducted a substudy on some of the subjects of both cohorts investigating selected indicators of semen quality. Overall, it was reported that there was little association between carrying a mobile phone in any pocket location and conception outcomes. These results were consistent in both cohorts and also when the results were pooled across both study groups. Further, there was little consistency on effects to semen quality parameters and mobile phone exposure.

Male cellular telephone exposure, fecundability, and semen quality: results from two preconception cohort studies

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This study explored a reported decline in male fertility, as reported in a previous analysis of 195 studies, between 1973 and 2011 (Levine et al., 2017). Some studies, including two meta-analyses (Adams et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2014), reported that radiofrequency electromagnetic energy (RF EME) from mobile phones may be associated with lower sperm motility, however, other recent studies did not report an association (Zhang et al., 2016; Lewis et al., 2017). Despite some limitations in this study by Hatch et al, including the assessment of exposure to RF EME by self-reported mobile phone habits which may have resulted in misclassification, the results are in line with other studies that did not report an association. Furthermore, the decline in male fertility trend started well before the introduction of mobile phones, suggesting a different causal factor.

This study has added to the growing body of scientific and health evidence for exposure to RF EME. There remains no substantiated scientific evidence that the use of mobile phones causes any health effects. This includes exposure to RF EME and fertility, which has been assessed in major reviews, including by the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR 2015).