FACT CHECK: Is your daily hot shower impacting your sperm count?

FACT CHECK: Is your daily hot shower impacting your sperm count?

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Many of us enjoy a hot, steaming shower. But frequent exposure to high temperatures could be affecting sperm count and male fertility

CLAIM:
Bathing with hot water frequently exposes your testicles to heat, which reduces your sperm count.
FACT:
Indeed! regularly bathing with hot water could result in a reduction in a man’s sperm count, albeit temporarily.
Hot showers and baths are part of many people’s daily routines. However, now some claim that this practice could hurt your sperm health. In a series of tweets on “common ways men damage their sperms without knowing,” an X.com user, with over 67 thousand followers on the platform, listed “hot baths” as one of the things that impact sperm count.
Read More: https://firstcheck.in/fact-check-daily-hot-shower-impacts-sperm-count/

“Bathing with hotwater frequently exposes your testicles to heat, which reduces your sperm count. (sic.) The same thing happens to men who use saunas often. In fact, if you’re worried about infertility, it’s best to bath with cold water. Avoid hot water baths!,” the user wrote in the post, which has close to 45 thousand views.

So are your daily hot showers reducing your sperm count?
Sperm is manufactured in the testicles, where it takes about 72 days for one sperm sto grow. Sperm production requires an ambient temperature, which is three to five degrees below the body temperature. This is why the testes hang away from the body—so that the sperm cell can mature at the temperature that it needs—95-to-97-degree Fahrenheit or 35 to 36 degrees centigrade.

Read : https://firstcheck.in/fact-check-daily-hot-shower-impacts-sperm-count/

This is where the claims that exposure to heat can lead to reduced sperm count and male infertility comes from- and there appears to be some scientific backing to these claims.

According to Harvard Health publishing, “if the temperature within the testicles is elevated by only two, three, or four degrees Fahrenheit, both sperm and testosterone production are negatively affected.”

Shower

However, these effects may not always be permanent. In 2007, a University of California, San Francisco urologist found that “exposure to hot baths or hot tubs can lead to male infertility.” The three-year study, which involved scrutinising data from infertile men who had been repeatedly exposed to high water temperatures through hot tubs, Jacuzzis or hot baths, also found that these “effects can sometimes be reversible.”

Also read: Fact Check: Does Tight Underwear Lower Sperm Count?

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