Virtual world

Mobile Phones Affect Brain Activity

Link between mobile phones and brain cancer

While population-based studies haven't led to conclusive findings about the link between mobile phones and brain cancer, a new study shows that energy from the devices can indeed affect brain activity.

Holding a mobile phone to your ear for a long period of time increases activity in parts of the brain close to the antenna, researchers have found.

Glucose metabolism — that’s a measurement of how the brain uses energy — in these areas increased significantly when the phone was turned on and muted, compared with when it was off.

“Although we cannot determine the clinical significance, our results give evidence that the human brain is sensitive to the effects of radiofrequency-electromagnetic fields from acute mobile phone exposures,”.

Although the study can’t draw conclusions about long-term implications, other researchers are calling the findings significant.

“Clearly there is an acute effect, and the important question is whether this acute effect is associated with events that may be damaging to the brain or predispose to the development of future problems such as cancer.

There have been many population-based studies evaluating the potential links between brain cancer and mobile phone use, and the results have often been inconsistent or inconclusive.

Most recently, the anticipated Interphone study was interpreted as “implausible” because some of its statistics revealed a significant protective effect for mobile phone use. On the other hand, the most intense users had an increased risk of glioma — but the researchers called their level of use “unrealistic.”

But few researchers have looked at the actual physiological effects that radiofrequency and electromagnetic fields from the devices can have on brain tissue. Some have shown that blood flow can be increased in specific brain regions during mobile phone use, but there’s been little work on effects at the level of the brain’s neurons.

The researchers scanned patients’ brain glucose metabolism twice — once with the right mobile phone turned on but muted, and once with both phones turned off. There was no difference in whole-brain metabolism whether the phone was on or off.

But glucose metabolism in the regions closest to the antenna — the orbitofrontal cortex and the temporal pole — was significantly higher when the phone was turned on.

Further analyses confirmed that the regions expected to have the greatest absorption of radiofrequency and electromagnetic fields from mobile phone use were indeed the ones that showed the larger increases in glucose metabolism.

“Even though the radio frequencies that are emitted from current mobile phone technologies are very weak, they are able to activate the human brain to have an effect,”. The effects on neuronal activity could be due to changes in neurotransmitter release, mobile membrane permeability, mobile excitability, or calcium efflux.

It’s also been theorized that heat from mobile phones can contribute to functional brain changes, but that is probably less likely to be the case, the researchers said..”