IT SEEMS that sitting on the toilet scrolling through social media may be bad for your health - and not necessarily for the reason you might think.
Beyond being hygienically questionable, researchers have also linked toilet phone use with haemorrhoids, or piles, attributed to spending more time sitting on the toilet in an anatomically non-ideal position.
While anecdotal evidence has previously linked smartphone use on the toilet with increased risk of haemorrhoids, few studies have actually investigated this.
So a US team conducted research on 125 adults undergoing colonoscopy, surveying them about their lifestyle and toilet habits and having endoscopists check them out for piles.
Among all participants, 66% reported using smartphones on the toilet, and after statistically accounting for other potential risk factors - such as exercise habits, age and fibre intake - the researchers found that phone users had a 46% higher risk of haemorrhoids than non-users.
Meanwhile, 37% of phone users spent more than five minutes at a time on the toilet, compared to 7% of non-users.
"This study bolsters advice to people in general to leave the smartphones outside the bathroom and to try to spend no more than a few minutes to have a bowel movement," the study's senior author Trisha Pasricha concluded.
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