Mountain biking's jostling linked to male infertility, study says

Remember the horror studies recently that pegged road cycling to infertility? The reason being the seat’s constant pressure and the heat buildup in, uh, delicate places. Now comes this new study out of Austria. Ferdinand Frauscher, a urology-radiology expert at University Hospital in Innsbruck, said he thinks it’s the constant vibration, jolts and jarring over rough terrain that could cause problems. He said it seems to create scars within the scrotum and impairs sperm production. Frauscher studied professional mountain bikers and other extreme bikers, ages 17 to 44, who biked about six days a week. Of 55 bikers in the study presented at last week’s annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, nine of 10 had low sperm counts and scrotum abnormalities. Only about one in four, or 26 percent, of non-bikers had similar damage.

SNEWS View: OOOW!!! Now that we have that out of our system, note that few people bike enough to likely worry about these problems.