People who take a mobile phone to the loo should keep to a two TikTok limit, according to doctors who found that toilet scrollers are more prone to haemorrhoids than phoneless lavatory-goers.
Those who sit on the throne with a phone spend far more time on the toilet than others, with longer stints linked to a greater risk of developing the bulging anal veins known as haemorrhoids or piles.
Though preliminary, the findings prompted the team to advise people against taking a phone to the lavatory, or at least to impose a scroll limit lest they become distracted and find themselves still sitting there half an hour later.
“Leave your smartphone outside because when you go in you have just one job, and you should focus on that job,” said Dr Trisha Pasricha, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “If the magic hasn’t happened within five minutes, you should get up and go. Take a breather and come back.”
Pasricha and her colleagues examined 125 people for haemorrhoids during colonoscopies for a bowel cancer screening programme. The same volunteers completed questionnaires on diet, exercise and bowel habits, including how long they spent on the toilet and whether they ever strained or experienced constipation.
Further questions, according to the study in Plos One, delved into people’s mobile phone habits to find out whether they took their device to the toilet and what apps they used once there. All were aged 45 and over.
Two-thirds of people admitted to taking a phone to the toilet, where most scrolled through news and social media. After accounting for common risk factors for haemorrhoids such as older age, physical inactivity and low dietary fibre, toilet scrollers were 46% more likely to have piles than those who left their phone behind. More than a third (37%) of toilet scrollers spent more than five minutes on the lavatory compared with only 7% of those without phones.
Reading on the toilet is nothing new, but Pasricha believes that the newspapers, magazines and books that once kept people occupied are no match for the likes of TikTok and Instagram. “The whole business model of these apps is to make you lose track of time,” she said. “Our pre-TikTok ancestors were just reading a newspaper or whatever they could find. It wasn’t distracting to the same level.”
More work is needed on the health implications, but Pasricha suspects that smartphone apps prolong the time people spend on the toilet, which in turn increases the pressure on anal tissues, leading to haemorrhoids. “If you’re just hanging out there in the open, this passive pressure will eventually, over time, cause the connective tissue to weaken and cause those veins to engorge,” she said.
One pressing question surrounds the habits of younger people. In a continuing study of college students, Pasricha said nearly all admitted to taking phones to the toilet, raising concerns that the teenagers of today might develop piles sooner than older generations.
Haemorrhoids affect up to a quarter of all adults, and while most resolve on their own or with minimal treatment, more than 20,000 surgical procedures are performed on piles each year in the UK alone.
For those who cannot contemplate being phoneless on the toilet, Pasricha suggests minimising the toilet scroll. “Set a two TikTok limit,” she said. “What you shouldn’t be doing is getting so trapped in this cycle of scrolling and watching TikTok that you lose track of why you came here in the first place.”
