So Many Health Risks. So Little Awareness.

Guest contributor and expert on Electromagnetic Pollution (a Class 2B carcinogen) and its health effects, EMR Australia founder Lyn McLean, provides another authoritative commentary on the dangers of (your proximity to and time spent using) cell phones. In her ongoing series for The Customer & The Constituent, she draws attention to the numerous issues associated with their emissions.

Lyn is Australia's foremost expert in the field, with three decades of experience in helping Australians understand and reduce electromagnetic exposures in their homes, businesses and learning environments. She established EMR Australia in 1996, and is a multiple-times published author on the topic.

(By Lyn McLean, Founder and Managing Director, EMR Australia)

A new study has found a link between mobile phone use and cardiovascular disease – a finding that should concern all eight billion-plus users.

The study, by researcher Yanjun Zhang and team, looked at data on over 444,000 people from Britain. They compared mobile phone use with various aspects of heart disease, factoring in any sleep and mental health problems.

The researchers found that mobile phone use was, in fact, related to heart disease.

"We first demonstrated that regular mobile phone use was associated with a significantly increased risk of incident CVD [cardiovascular disease]," the authors said. "In regular mobile phone users, a longer weekly mobile phone usage time was related to a significantly increased risk of incident CVD and each component of it, including incident CHD, stroke, HF [heart failure], and AF [atrial fibrillation]."

They also found that people who used mobile phones for longer each week had a higher risk of having more carotid intimamedia thickness (CIMT). This is important because CIMT is a measure of carotid atherosclerosis – which occurs when arteries become blocked with plaque, increasing the risk of stroke.

How Can Mobile Phone Radiation Cause Cardiovascular Damage?

The authors say:

"Mobile phones emit radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs), which could induce hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis deregulation, inflammatory reaction, and oxidative stress, and therefore are expected to affect various organs, such as heart and blood vessels."

The risk of cardiovascular disease was higher in mobile phone users who smoked and had diabetes. The authors suggest this might be because mobile phone use, smoking and diabetes all cause oxidative stress.

Links to Further Health Issues Also Emerge in Study

Another significant finding of the study was that mobile phone use and cardiovascular disease were linked to poor sleep, psychological distress and neurosis.

Interestingly, previous research has shown a link between mobile phone use and depression and sleep problems.

The authors of the current study say:

"This study encourages measures such as facilitating mobile phones’ function of displaying and reminding mobile phone users of mobile phone usage time", in an endeavour to decrease time spent on mobile phones and thus promote the primary prevention of CVD events.

Zhang, Yanjun et al:  Regular Mobile Phone Use and Incident Cardiovascular Diseases: Mediating Effects of Sleep Patterns, Psychological Distress, and Neuroticism, Canadian Journal of Cardiology in press, onlinecjc.ca/article/S0828 282X(24)00437-9/fulltext