Mobile phones receive very high frequency electromagnetic radiation. For a long time it has been uncertain whether such radiation is harmful to human beings using mobile phones, and the radiation has been suspected of increasing the risk of brain tumours. The proposed series of tests aims to investigate whether mobile phones emitting such radiation affect cerebral metabolism. The hypothesis to be tested in this study is that the radiation received deposits energy in the cerebral tissue, which is therefore heated up. The heating of cerebral tissue increases metabolism, and nonphysiologic increases in metabolism are known to cause so-called excitotoxic injury to the cerebral tissue due to pathologically high concentrations of the signal substance glutamic acid, which normally generates more modest increases in cerebral activity. The excitotoxic mechanism also affects the supporting cells of the brain, the astrocytes, which may undergo malignant transformation in the short or long term. This hypothesis will be supported at increases in the frequency of cerebral blood flow and the cerebral oxygen and glucose consumption upon exposure to high-frequency radiation. This hypothesis will be particularly supported if the increases are accompanied by changed ratios between the three variables as a sign of metabolic imbalance. The measurements are made by positron emission tomography (PET) at the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) in Aarhus, which has expertise in this field. The tests will be conducted on healthy volunteers with a mobile phone either on or off immediately at the right temporal region.
The project will be conducted in collaboration with researchers of the Department of Communication Technology of Aalborg University (Gert Frølund Pedersen, Lecturer, and Professor Emeritus Jørgen Bach Andersen).
