Saunas And Hot Tubs Will Boil Your Sperm To Death
Does a sauna make you feel all hot and bothered and sexy? You might want to rethink that. A new Italian study suggests that men who love soaking up the heat in saunas could suffer from lower sperm counts. Good news, though—the effect may be only temporary.
Researchers at the University of Padova in Italy recruited 10 healthy Finnish men in their 30s for the study. All had normal sperm counts at the start of the trial, and they agreed to spend 15 minutes in a sauna twice a week for three months.
Checks after the period found that all the men had lower sperm counts, which remained below normal for another three months after they stopped visiting saunas. However, after six months their sperm counts bounced back to normal.
The findings make sense, says Dr Andrew Kramer, urologist at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, because higher temperatures are known to affect sperm production. The sauna sessions increased scrotal temperatures by 3°C.
"The testicles hang down from the body in men to cool them," he said, adding that men with undescended testicles can have impaired sperm production. However, the new study didn't assess the men's fertility, so it's impossible to know whether their fruitfulness was cooked during the period they took saunas.
A man's sperm count doesn't always correspond to his virility either, says Kramer, so because of this saunas can't be used as a method of birth control. Also, he added that the new study doesn't provide enough evidence to say that healthy men shouldn't visit saunas altogether.
Prior research has linked lower sperm counts with frequent use of hot tubs, as well as keeping a laptop on your lap for long periods of time. But Kramer says more study is needed to look at the effects of sauna exposure on men whose fertility is already impaired, or on boys who haven't reached puberty.
The study was originally reported by LiveScience.com and appears in the print edition of the journal Human Reproduction.
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