Butler Williams & Skilling Blog

Think Twice About Holding Your Cell Phone to Your Ear

Are we going to have to go back to the days of mounted car phones?  A new study concludes that radiation from cell phones can affect the memory.  At the Division of Neurosurgery, Lund University, in Sweden. Henrietta Nittby, researchers studied rats that were exposed to mobile phone radiation for two hours a week for more than a year. These rats had poorer results on a memory test than rats that had not been exposed to radiation.

The lead researchers believe that the findings indicate that microwave radiation from cell phones can affect the so-called blood-brain barrier. This is a barrier that protects the brain by preventing substances circulating in the blood from penetrating into the brain tissue and damaging nerve cells.  The bottom line is the rats in the experiments suffered brain damage  from the microwave radiation, and the brain damage caused memory problems.

The research team also found certain nerve damage in the form of damaged nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.  Moreover, they have discovered alterations in the activity of a large number of genes, not in individual genes but in groups that are functionally related.

Henrietta Nittby, one of the researchers, has cell phone herself, but never holds it to her ear, using hands-free equipment instead.