Vaping can shrink testicles, cause sperm counts to plummet: study

Male e-cigarette users are losing more than their tobacco habit.

New research on male rats has shown that vaping can shrink the size of testicles, hampering sex drive and reducing sperm count.

Turkish scientists took readings of the rats’ testicle size before and after exposing the animals to cigarette smoke and e-cigarette vapors, as well as identifying biomarkers of stress in the blood and genitals.

And yet the impact of conventional cigarette smoke, as previous studies suggest, is even worse on the male organ, researchers confirmed.

The sperm count of rats exposed to e-cigarette vapor was 95.1 million sperm per milliliter, compared to 98.5 million per milliliter in the group who were not exposed to any nicotine substances.

However, the group of rats exposed to cigarette smoke had the lowest of all three counts with 89 million sperm per milliliter. Their testes also measured the smallest and weighed less than the rats exposed to e-cigarette vapor as well as the control group.

“It should be considered that although [e-cigarette] liquid has been introduced as harmless in smoking cessation studies, it could increase oxidative stress and cause morphological changes in the testicle,” researchers wrote in their report, published this month in the Spanish-language journal Revista Internacional de Andrología.

In 2020, Danish researchers also found that men who used e-cigarettes daily had a significantly lower total sperm count than non-vapers, but authors of the current study say more human data is needed to support these findings — as e-cigarettes have been touted as an effective method to help people kick their tobacco habit.

“To be a safe option in smoking cessation studies, its effect on people needs to be enlightened,” they concluded.

An estimated 12 million adults use e-cigarettes while millions more children and teens have been added to the vaping population, despite age restrictions.

Along with the dangers now associated with e-cigarette use, including lung injury and poor mental health, vaping has also previously been linked to impeding fertility, according to the journal Life, which cautions against the notion that e-cigarettes are a “safe” alternative to smoking cigarettes.

For people experiencing problems with fertility and getting pregnant, doctors first recommend that smokers quit tobacco. However, mounting studies on the composition and effects of vaping liquid have indicated that e-cigarettes may not be an ideal substitute for tobacco products in those struggling with fertility.