Cell phones and the brain

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, July, 2002 by John D. MacArthur

The summer 1999 heat wave in the Midwest revealed another piece to the neurological health puzzle. The US Centers for Disease Control found that psychiatric medicines could make the mentally ill especially vulnerable to death from intense summer heat. This is because antidepressants that target the brain can interfere with the body's thermoregulatory system. (22)

Heat Stress from EMFs

To protect body tissue from being overheated, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set the maximum allowed "specific absorption rate" (SAR) from cell phones at 1.6 W/Kg (watts per kilogram). This is partial-body exposure, as averaged over one gram of tissue. The whole-body threshold is 0.08 W/Kg.

This thermal threshold is itself problematical, because it is based on the body's ability to maintain homeostasis during heating from the radiofrequency radiation. But even if the body's thermoregulatory mechanism succeeds in distributing the heat and maintaining the temperature at the pre-irradiation value, a certain stress still develops.

A pioneer in the bioeffects of electromagnetic fields, Robert O. Becker, MD, emphasizes the role of EMFs in producing stress. In his landmark 1990 book, Cross Currents: The Perils of Electropollution; The Promise of Electromedicine, he points out that exposure to any abnormal electromagnetic field produces a stress response. After prolonged exposure, the body's stress response system can be exhausted and the immune system compromised. In such a state, animals and humans could become more susceptible to cancer and infectious diseases.

Dr. Becker refers to experiments conducted in the early 1980s by the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine that were reported in the September 1986 issue of Scientific American. Test animals were continuously exposed for long periods to microwaves at a power density twenty times lower than the safe thermal level. They develoyed a fourfold increase in cancers of the pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal glands -- the primary organs though which the body mediates stress.

The cellular stress response is a protective mechanism that enables cells to survive, it is activated by a wide variety of environmental stimuli, such as high temperature, oxygen starvation, and heavy metals, as well as EMFs. Cells essentially perceive man-made electromagnetic fields as potentially harmful.

Thermal vs. Non-Thermal Stress Response

Ongoing research by Columbia University scientists Reba Goodman and Martin Blank has focused on how EMFs cause stress in cells. They found that the "cellular response to low frequency magnetic fields is activated by unusually weak stimuli, and involves pathways only partially associated with heat shock stress." (23)

To provide a more realistic basis for new cell phone safety standards, Goodman and Blank have recently focused on the bioeffects of radiofrequency radiation. They discovered remarkable similarities in the biological responses to both the low and the high frequency fields emanating from cell phones. What's more, preliminary results showed that "the energy required to induce stress proteins with low frequency EM fields is 14 orders of magnitude lower than required by temperature increase." (24)