According to a study conducted on rats, excessive use of smartphones or tablets causes sexual symptoms to develop quickly in men.
The research, presented at the 61st annual European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology meeting in The Hague, Netherlands, sheds light on how environmental factors, such as screen time, early sexual characteristics and testicle tissue, affect the testicular tissue.
There are no obvious causes for early sexual characteristics in most children. Sometimes it’s due to genetics, or a problem with the brain, such as an injury, tumor, thyroid, adrenal, or sex glands.
In recent years, several studies have reported an increase in early sexual symptoms for both girls and boys, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. One factor may be the increased use of blue light emitting devices, but this is very difficult to assess in children.
In this study, researchers from Ankara Bilkent City Hospital and Gazi University in Turkey examined 18 male rats aged 21 days, divided into three groups of six. They were kept in normal light and blue light.
The researchers found that male mice exposed to blue light showed sexual characteristics much earlier. Additionally, the more blue light the mice were exposed to, the earlier their puberty began, while they also experienced impaired sperm development and damage to testicular tissue.
“For the first time, we found a direct link between blue light exposure and early sexual characteristics in male rats,” said lead researcher Dr. Aylin Klink Ugurlu, from Ankara Bikent City Hospital.
“Our findings are consistent with our previous work in female mice, which also showed similar effects,” Ugurlu said, “providing a more comprehensive view of how blue light may affect sexual traits in both male and female mice.” Has gone.”
The researchers said in the paper published in Frontiers in Endocrinology that although the findings suggest that blue light exposure could potentially be a risk factor for early puberty, more research is needed.
“I want to emphasize that this is a mouse study and direct results cannot be extrapolated to humans,” Ugurlu said. “However, we provide an experimental basis to investigate the health consequences of ever-increasing screen time in modern society.”
The researchers will now focus on assessing the effect of blue light exposure before sexual symptoms in adult rats.
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This post originally appeared on thebegusarai.in