While population-based reviews haven’t prompted conclusive findings about the connection between cell phones and brain cancer, another review shows that energy from the devices can indeed affect brain activity.
Holding a cell phone to your ear for a long period of time expand activity in parts of the brain close to the antenna, specialists have found.
Glucose metabolism — that is a measurement of how the brain utilizes energy — in these areas expanded essentially when the phone was turned on and muted, compared with when it was off, Dr. Nora Volkow, chief of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and partners reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Although we can’t determine the clinical significance, our results give prove that the human brain is touchy to the effects of radiofrequency-electromagnetic fields from acute cell phone exposures,” co-author Dr. Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, where the review was conducted, told MedPage Today.
What We Know About Cell Phones and Cancer
Although the study can not draw conclusions about long-term suggestions, other scientists are calling the findings significant.
“Clearly there is an acute impact, and the important question is whether this intense effect is related with occasions that may be harm to the brain or predispose to the development of future problems, for example, cancer as suggested by recent epidemiological reviews,” Dr. Santosh Kesari, director of neuro-oncology at the University of California San Diego, said in an email.
There have been numerous population-based reviews assessing the potential connections between brain cancer and cellphone use, and the results have often been inconsistent or uncertain.
Most recently, the anticipated Inter phone study was translated as “implausible” because some of its statistics revealed a significant protective impact for cell phone use. On the other hand, the most extreme users had an increased danger of glioma — but the researchers called their level of utilization “unrealistic.”
But few researchers have looked at the genuine physiological impacts that radio frequency 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 cell phone utilize, but there’s been little work on impacts at the level of the brain’s neurons.
Are Cell Phones Dangerous for Kids?
But glucose digestion in the regions nearest 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 best absorption of radio frequency and electromagnetic fields from mobile phone utilize were indeed the ones that showed the bigger 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 impact,” Dr. Volkow said in a JAMA video report.