Vaping Can Shrink Testicles And Lower Sperm Counts In Rats

Rats. This is probably not what you are aiming for if you happen to vape. Exposure to smoke from e-cigarettes seemed to have a “small” effect on the testicles of adult male Wistar rats in a study described by a publication in the journal Revista Internacional de Andrología. In this case, a small effect meant drops in testicle size. And that wasn’t the only thing about the balls that dropped. The rats’ sperm counts also decreased. In the study, rats who weren’t exposed to any type of nicotine had an average sperm count of 98.5 million per milliliter whereas those that had gotten their fill of e-cigarette smoke had a lower average of 95.1 million sperm per milliliter.

That’s not all. Some of the rats who were exposed to either cigarette or e-cigarette smoke had what was described by the study authors as “disorganized seminiferous tubules.” Seminiferous tubules are the tube-shaped structures in the testicles that produce sperm. And having these things be disorganized is not exactly a “tubular” experience because it may negatively affect sperm production and quality. The research team from Cumhuriyet University (Hüseyin Saygın, Esat Korgalı, and Tülay Koç) and Sivas Numune Hospital (Kübra Doğan) in Turkey found other things to be nuts as well: separated germ and Sertoli cells, cavity formation, cell death, and accumulation of fibrous tissues. Yeah, it’s one thing for people to say that your room is disorganized. It’s something totally different to have your testicles be disorganized. An organizational expert ain’t going to be able to help you with the latter.

This certainly wasn’t the first study to be on the ball about what may happen when rats are exposed to e-cigarette vapor. Other rat studies have shown such exposure to be associated with the increased death of sperm and changes in sperm-producing tissues and low testicular weight, signs of tissue damage, and the impairment of key enzymes in the sperm-production process. Researchers have also found more DNA damage and abnormal structures in the sperm of rats who were exposed to e-cigarette vapor. That’s obviously not great news for rats who want to have a house with a white picket fence and start a family.

Now, assuming that you don’t have whiskers and a long tail, you may insist that all of these study results do not apply to you because you are not a rat— at least, physically. It’s true that there haven’t been equivalent human studies showing such effects. That’s because it’s much harder to get humans to participate in the same kinds of studies as rats. For example, you can’t tell a human, “Here keep inhaling this e-cigarettes smoke and then we’ll remove your testicles and see how disorganized they’ve gotten.” However, a study published in 2020 in the journal Human Reproduction did find that human males who used e-cigarettes on a daily basis had an average total sperm count of 91 million compared to the 147 million for those who did not use e-cigarettes at all. Moreover, back in December 2021, I covered for Forbes a study that found vaping to be associated with over twice the erectile dysfunction risk. This suggests that vaping could be quite a standing problem as well.

These findings shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s not as if you are simply inhaling pixie dust when vaping. E-cigarette vapor can consist of a number of different chemicals that could potentially have untoward effects on your balls. This includes nicotine, various flavoring compounds, formaldehyde and a range of heavy metals. In this case, heavy metals don’t mean music from the group Ratt. Rather, e-cigarette vapor can contain nanoparticles of heavy metal compounds such as cadmium, copper and lead.

Just because vaping has been promoted as a safer alternative to cigarette smoking, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily safe to do. You are, of course, more than your testicles. And studies have suggested that vaping can negatively affect other parts of your body as well such as your heart and lungs, as I have covered for Forbes previously. So there are many embodied reasons to be concerned about e-cigarette vapor and to not vape unless it is no more than a temporary transition measure to help you quit smoking. But, in case you happen to rank your testicles higher than other parts of your body in terms of importance, maybe this latest rat study could end up being the kick in the groin that’s needed for you to quit vaping.