Subjective Symptoms and Physiological Changes of RF Exposure by a Cellular Phone

Due to the fast increase in cellular phone users, public interest on health effect of electromagnetic fields(EMFs) by cellular phonos is gradually increasing. Some EHS(electromagnetic hypersensitivity) patients complain of psycho-neurophysiological symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, memory loss resulting from RF radiation by CDMA cellular phones. However, EHS is difficult to diagnose and depends on the individual's subjective judgement. And we don't know clearly if the cause of EHS is uneasiness or real exposure. There have been various EHS volunteer studies on heart rate, blood pressure and subjective symptoms using GSM phones. But there are few studies on experimental case-control study investigating physiological parameters, subjective symptoms, and perception of EMFs. In this study, two volunteer groups of 17 self-declared EHS and 19 controls were exposed to both sham and real RF exposure by CDMA cellular phones for half an hour each. We investigated not only the physiological parameters such as heart rates, respiration rates and HRVs(hear rate variability), but also the perception of EMFs and subjective symptoms. As the results, EMF exposure did not have any effects on the subjective symptoms or physiological parameters for both groups. For the EMF perception, there was no evidence that EHS group perceived the EMFs correctly than the control groupope