Comparison of the effects of continuous and pulsed mobile phone like RF exposure on the human EEG.
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Date
2008-02-15
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Abstract
It is not clear yet whether Global System for Mobiles GSM mobile phone radiation has the ability to interfere with normal resting brain function There have been reports that GSM exposure increases alpha band power and does so only when the signal is modulated at low frequencies Huber R Treyer V Borbely A A Schuderer J Gottselig J M Landolt H P Werth E Berthold T Kuster N Buck A and Achermann P Electromagnetic fields such as those from mobile phones alter regional cerebral blood flow and sleep and waking EEG J Sleep Res 11 289 295 2002 However as that research employed exposure distributions that are not typical of normal GSM handset usage deep brain areas were overexposed it remains to be determined whether a similar result patterning would arise from a more representative exposure In this fully counterbalanced cross over design we recruited 12 participants and tried to replicate the modulation linked post exposure alpha band power increase described above but with an exposure source dipole antenna more closely resembling that of a real GSM handset Exposures lasted for 15 minutes No changes to alpha power were found for either modulated or unmodulated radiofrequency fields and thus we failed to replicate the above results Possible reasons for this failure to replicate are discussed with the main reason argued to be the lower and more representative exposure distribution employed in the present study In addition we investigated the possible GSM exposure related effects on the non linear features of the resting electroencephalogram using the Approximate Entropy ApEn method of analysis Again no effect was demonstrated for either modulated or unmodulated radiofrequency exposures