Vaping is a very controversial topic and for good reason. This year, it was found that around 20% of children have tried vaping, that vapes have dangerous levels of lead in them and now, new research has found that your vaping habit could, uh, be shrinking your balls.
Published in the Spanish medical journal Revista Internacional de Andrologia, the Turkish scientists tested to see if vaping had any impact on the testicle count and sperm count of rats. Mice and rats have anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarities to humans meaning they’re often used in experiments to understand risks to human health.
So, how did they do it?
So, before they got started, the researchers measured the size of the rats balls and their sperm counts. From there, they found that the average rat had around 98.5 million sperm per millilitre..
These rats were then separated into three groups which were separately exposed to cigarette smoke, e-cig vapours and the last one didn’t experience anything. Lucky them.
The rats were placed in to jars and exposed to the smoke or for an hour at a time, twice a day.
Once this research was completed, it was found that the rats exposed to vapour had lower sperm counts, measuring 95.1 million sperm per millilitre for the e-cigarette group and for those exposed to smoke, theirs dropped to around 89 million sperm per mililitre. Yikes.
Finally, it was found that smoking and vaping can impact the size and structure of testicles. According to Forbes, the study authors said that the rats exposed to smoke and vapour were found to have ‘disorganised seminiferous tubules’. The tubules are the tube-shaped structures that produce sperm and having them disorganised can reduce sperm production and quantity.
Lower sperm count or poor sperm health can lead to male infertility so if you needed yet another reason to kick the habit, this might be it.
The study authors urge that more research should be done on humans to see how big this impact potentially is and whether vaping really is a viable alternative to smoking.