MARTIN ROOSLI - Children and mobile technology
Summary
TLDRProfessor Martin Rosely's lecture delves into the impact of mobile technology on children, focusing on the effects of electromagnetic fields and potential addiction. Utilizing data from Swiss and South African studies, he explores associations between mobile phone use, cognitive functions, health issues, and behavioral changes in adolescents. The study reveals that while moderate use may enhance cognitive abilities, excessive use could lead to sleep disturbances and decreased health-related quality of life, suggesting a need for balanced e-media engagement.
Takeaways
- 📲 Mobile phone technology, particularly its effects on children and adolescents, is a significant focus, with concerns about electromagnetic fields, addiction, and other problematic aspects of e-media use.
- 🧠 The study conducted in Switzerland, named 'Hermes', aimed to explore the impact of mobile phone use on adolescent behavior, cognitive functions, and health disturbances like headaches and sleep issues.
- 📡 Mobile phones emit radio frequency microwaves, which are known for their heating effects, and regulatory limits are set to prevent dangerous levels of exposure.
- 🧐 The absorption of mobile phone radiation varies with frequency and size, with children's brains potentially being more affected due to their smaller size and higher relative depth of exposure.
- 📉 A longitudinal study involving Swiss and South African adolescents found associations between mobile phone use and various health issues, but the causality remains unclear.
- 📱 The most significant source of electromagnetic field exposure to the brain comes from mobile phone calls, contributing to 94% of the cumulative radiation absorbed by the brain.
- 🤔 The study suggests that high doses of electromagnetic fields, possibly due to low connection quality and maximum power transmission, could affect figural memory development in adolescents.
- 🛑 Cross-sectional analysis showed that low mobile phone use was associated with a higher quality of life, while high social media use on mobile phones was linked to lower well-being scores.
- 🌐 A study in South Africa found that high mobile phone use, especially when causing nighttime disturbances, was associated with increased sleep disturbances and headaches.
- 📈 Moderate mobile phone use was found to be beneficial for cognitive functions, suggesting that some exposure may improve information access and be useful for education.
- 🚫 The potential non-radiation effects of e-media, such as content consumption and addiction, are likely more significant than any direct effects from electromagnetic fields.
Q & A
Who is the speaker in the provided transcript?
-The speaker is Martin Rosely, a professor for environmental epidemiology at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.
What is the main topic of the lecture?
-The main topic of the lecture is the impact of mobile technology on children, covering aspects such as electromagnetic fields, addiction, and other problematic aspects of e-media use.
What are the two studies mentioned in the lecture?
-The two studies mentioned are conducted in Switzerland and South Africa, both focusing on the effects of mobile phone use on adolescents.
What is the term 'HERMES' an acronym for in the context of the Swiss study?
-HERMES stands for 'House Effects Related to Mobile phone use in Adolescence,' and it was chosen because Hermes is the code of communication and trade, fitting the mobile phone study.
What type of study design was used in the Swiss study?
-The Swiss study used a longitudinal study design, specifically a prospective cohort study, with two separate sub-studies conducted in 2012 and 2014.
What age group were the participants in the Swiss study?
-The participants in the Swiss study were seventh to eighth-grade students, mostly between 13 and 14 years old at the time of recruitment.
What are the main sources of electromagnetic field exposure for adolescents according to the study?
-The main sources of electromagnetic field exposure for adolescents are calls made on mobile phones and the use of DECT phones, contributing to 94% of the cumulative absorbed radiation to the brain.
What is the concern regarding the developing brain and mobile technology use?
-The concern is that the developing brain, which continues to reorganize and develop until the age of 16, may be affected by the physical radiation from mobile technology or the content consumed through it.
What findings did the study have regarding the impact of mobile phone use on cognitive functions?
-The study found that the cumulative dose of electromagnetic fields absorbed by the brain had a slight effect on figural memory, with a decrease in its development over one year in relation to the absorbed dose.
What was the association between mobile phone use and health-related quality of life?
-The study found that low use of mobile phones was related to a positive health-related quality of life, while high social use and being woken up by mobile phones at night were associated with sleep disturbances, headaches, and lower scores in various health-related aspects.
What conclusions did the speaker draw about the effects of e-media use on adolescents?
-The speaker concluded that a vigilant balance is needed to profit from the beneficial effects of moderate e-media use on cognition while preventing negative side effects on health-related quality of life, sleep disturbance, and headache severity.
What is the current research status on the link between mobile phone use and brain tumors in children?
-The current research, including a multi-center case-control study involving Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian researchers, has not found an increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phone use among adolescents.
What is the speaker's final take on the relevance of electromagnetic fields from mobile phones compared to non-radiation effects?
-The speaker suggests that non-radiation effects of e-media are most likely more relevant than potential effects from electromagnetic fields, emphasizing the importance of considering content, distraction, and behavioral impacts of mobile technology use.
Outlines
📱 Mobile Technology and Adolescent Health
Professor Martin Rosely introduces a lecture on the impact of mobile technology on children, focusing on electromagnetic fields, addiction, and other issues related to e-media use. He discusses two studies conducted in Switzerland and South Africa involving adolescents. The studies aim to explore the relationship between obesity, inattention, fatigue, myopia, depression, headache, and e-media use, highlighting the difficulty in determining causality with cross-sectional data. The Swiss study, named 'Hermes' after the Greek god of communication, is a longitudinal, prospective cohort study examining the effects of mobile phone use on adolescent behavior and health, including cognitive functions and disturbances like headaches and sleep issues.
🧠 Electromagnetic Field Exposure and Adolescent Brain Development
The lecture continues with an exploration of the types of electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones, emphasizing the heating effects of radio frequency microwaves. It explains that absorption of these fields depends on frequency and size, noting that children's brains absorb radiation differently due to their size. The study calculated the cumulative brain dose and whole-body dose for participants, finding that mobile phone calls and DECT phones contribute significantly to brain radiation absorption. The potential impact of mobile technology on the developing adolescent brain is also discussed, along with the use of latent class analysis to identify different user types, such as gamers and high social media users. The study found an association between the physical dose of electromagnetic fields and figural memory development, suggesting that high doses could affect memory processes.
🌐 Mobile Phone Use and Health-Related Quality of Life
This section delves into the relationship between mobile phone use and health-related quality of life, including sleep disturbances and headaches. Cross-sectional analysis revealed that low mobile use was associated with a better quality of life, while high social media use was linked to lower scores in various health aspects. The study in South Africa corroborated these findings, showing that high mobile use, especially when interrupted at night, led to increased sleep disturbances and headaches. Interestingly, cognitive tests indicated that moderate mobile phone use might be beneficial for cognitive functions, suggesting a need for a balanced approach to mobile use in education.
🏥 Research on Mobile Phones and Brain Tumor Risk
The final part of the lecture addresses concerns about the potential link between mobile phone use and brain tumors. A multi-center case-control study involving researchers from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway found no increased risk of brain tumors associated with mobile phone use. Time trend analysis also did not show an increase in brain tumor incidence, which would be expected if mobile phone use posed a significant risk. The lecture concludes by emphasizing the complexity of the relationship between e-media use and health, suggesting that non-radiation effects, such as content and distraction, are likely more relevant than potential electromagnetic field effects. It also highlights the importance of considering reverse causality and confounding factors in understanding the impact of mobile technology on adolescents.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Environmental Epidemiology
💡Electromagnetic Fields (EMF)
💡Mobile Technology
💡Addiction
💡Obesity
💡Cross-Sectional Association
💡Longitudinal Study
💡Cognitive Functions
💡Health-Related Quality of Life
💡Latent Class Analysis
💡Reverse Causality
Highlights
Lecture by Martin Rosely on the effects of mobile technology on children, including electromagnetic fields and addiction.
Use of data from two studies conducted in Switzerland and South Africa involving adolescents.
Cross-sectional associations found between obesity, inattention, fatigue, myopia, depression, and headache with e-media use.
The difficulty in determining causality between e-media use and health issues in adolescents.
Introduction of the HERMES study focusing on mobile phone use effects on adolescent behavior and health.
Longitudinal study design of the Swiss study with repeated examinations of students.
Inclusion of surveys, memory testing, and exposure assessment in the study methodology.
Differentiation between various types of electromagnetic fields and their effects.
The heating effect of mobile phone radiation and its regulation to prevent harmful levels.
The higher relative depth of mobile phone radiation exposure in children due to smaller brain size.
The significant contribution of mobile phone and cordless phone calls to cumulative brain radiation dose.
The developing brain's vulnerability to the effects of mobile technology use.
Use of latent class analysis to identify different user types based on mobile device usage patterns.
Findings that high cumulative brain dose from mobile phones affects figural memory development in adolescents.
Association between low mobile phone use and positive health-related quality of life in cross-sectional analysis.
Observations from South African study on high mobile phone use correlating with sleep disturbance and headaches.
Cognitive test results indicating potential benefits of moderate mobile phone use for adolescents.
Conclusion emphasizing the need for a balance between beneficial and negative effects of e-media use in education.
Discussion on the potential risk of brain tumors from mobile phone use and findings from a multi-center study.
The complexity of the relationship between e-media use, cognitive function, behavior, and health.
The importance of considering non-radiation effects and potential confounding factors in e-media use studies.
The need for education on the avoidance of nighttime mobile phone use and its impact on health.
Transcripts
welcome
everybody my name is martin rosely
i'm professor for environmental
epidemiology
at the swiss tropical and public health
institute
in the next few minutes i will give a
lecture about
children and mobile technology so we
will
address different aspects of mobile
phone technology
and its effect like electromagnetic
fields
or addiction or other problematic
aspects of e-media use
i will use data from two studies that we
have conducted
one in switzerland and one in south
africa
both have been conducted in adolescence
many more studies have already shown
cross-sectional association between
obesity and immediate use or
inattention fatigue myopia
depression or headache but it's always
difficult with cross-sectional
associations we do not know what is the
hand
and what is the egg so does obesity
makes people using e-media differently
or has e-media use an effect
on the fatigue of adolescence
so that is something we wanted to
explore
in a study in switzerland this was the
so-called
hermestoli house effects related to
mobile phone
use in adolescence hermes is the code of
communication
and the code of trade so we thought
it fits very well to a mobile phone
study and usually you see these pictures
of hermes
carrying something in the head and
nowadays we know
this must be a smartphone
and the main question and the main
idea behind this study was to explore
whether exposure from
better electromagnetic field exposure
from mobile phone
or where the mobile phone use per se is
affecting the behavior of adolescents
cognitive functions or health
disturbance
like headache or sleep disturbances
this is a longitudinal study a
prospective cohort study
it consisted out of two separate
sub-studies
both at the baseline the first study in
2012
the other one in 2014 and the year later
the same students were examined
again students were seventh to 8th grade
so most
of them were between 13 and 14 years
at the date of recruitment and we have
done
several surveys they asked about mobile
phone news and general media use
about social and demographic factors and
have
questionnaire and computerized memory
testing
we also did a lot of exposure assessment
including modeling
and obtaining operate the data from
these
adolescents to have objective data on
how much they use their mobile phone
and also the parents filled in a survey
where we got
additional relevant information for our
data analysis
but let us first talk about
electromagnetic fields
what type of exposure are we dealing
with
so mobile phones emit in the radio
frequency microwave
frequency range so typically this is a
few hundred megahertz
up to a few gigahertz that is used for
this type of communication
and it's well known that this type of
microwave radiation has a heating effect
this is well investigated
and is taken into account in the
regulatory limits
so as long as you are below the
regulatory limits such
heating effects will not occur at the
dangerous level you also have other
electromagnetic fields like extremely
low frequency fields
this is related to use of currency
we have infrared which makes also
warming
and then we have the visible light the
ultraviolet
and of course the ionizing radiation
which is known to cause
cancer for instance the x-ray used for
medical diagnostics
so it's important to realize that
absorption depends on the frequency and
the size
so we see that very clearly in and in
the old
type of antenna that has used different
size
to receive the different
tb programs that were transmitted on
slightly different frequency
and we can also see that in children
that the absorption frequency
is slightly different for children than
for adults
but in general it's still relatively
similar so
you wouldn't expect completely different
absorptions
so here you see a brain a cross-section
of a brain
and what is clear mobile phone radiation
penetrates to some extent
into the brain and obviously the smaller
the brain
so the smaller the child the relative
depth is higher that is achieved by this
type of radiation
so if you look into the inner part of
the brain the children will be exposed
to higher levels
like than adults
in our study we looked what is the most
relevant
source in daily life and we calculated
the cumulative brain dose of our static
participants
and also the whole body though so what
is absorbed by the whole body
and what we see the most important
factors for the brain those are calls by
the mobile phones
also our study participants did not talk
a lot on the phones
a few minutes a day not more and the
second
important part are dect phones so these
are cordless phones
both together contribute 94
of the cumulative absorb the radiation
of the brain here on the right side of
this very
um slight line you can see the so-called
far-field or
environmental sources like radio tower
or downlink is considered to be
mobile phone base station towers
and you see only six percent of the
absorbed radiation originates from these
type of sources
and even if you go to the whole body
then maybe
calling by a mobile phone or cordless
phone is not that important
anymore but then the students these
adolescents used mobile phones a lot
for data transmission for surfing
browsing the internet
and so still 91 of the absorbed
radiation
comes from the own device whereas only
nine percent
are from environmental sources
another important aspects to consider
when we talk about
children and mobile technology is the
developing brain
and the brain is developing quite long
so you see
here even in the age of 12 to 16
the brain is reorganized there are still
developments
so there's some concern that then
children
still can be affected by mobile
technology use
b the physical radiation or be it
just the content of what they consume
and how they consume their the content
in our study we have used a
clustering method the latent class
analysis
to differentiate between different
user types so we had in yellow the
gamers
so they use mostly mobile devices
e-media devices
for playing games then we had the medium
users in green so they use everything a
little bit
then those who low use who do very
little
calls on the mobile phone but still do
text message and and so on
and then we have this uh students
they have a call preference so they use
mobile phones mostly for calling
but not a lot of other activities and
then
high social use is in blue so they use a
lot of social network
like facebook or twitter and on their
mobile phone you wouldn't be surprised
that gamers are mostly boys 99
in our samples that low use was
only prevalent in the first study in
2012 and 2013
whereas a few years later usage was much
higher
the call preference was also mainly in
the sample one
after that smartphones has been more
used also for other activities
and high social use is something which
is
mainly done by girls what we then have
seen in our data analysis
indeed that the cumulative
dose to the brain the physical dose
has an effect on the figural memory so
we found that the figural memory
the development of figural memory over
one year
was slightly decreased in relation
to the emf dose absorbed by the brain
we haven't seen something for verbal
memory there was no association
and this was quite interesting because
the figural memory is
located on the right side of the brain
and more than 80 percent of our
participants use the mobile phone on the
right side of the brain
the verbal memory is more on the left
side of the brain
and so it's not surprising that we could
not see it
but we have done a lateral analysis and
have indeed seen there was a tendency
that right side user had an effect on
figural memory only
and left side user user on verbal memory
only
so this suggests that indeed
memory processes could be affected by
high dose of electromagnetic fields that
can occur
if a mobile phone has a low connection
quality
and transmit with maximum power
we also looked into health relate the
quality of life
and there it was quite clear and this is
a cross-sectional analysis
low use was related with
green squares so with positive
will help relate the quality of life you
can see different
different dimensions physical well-being
psychological well-being moods and
emissions
and so on and if you here see a red
so this means that they have lowest
score
here so that the social support on peers
so there might be actually a
disadvantage in adolescence if they are
not using the mobile phone a lot
they may have less support on the other
hand
those who have a high social use so it's
not the call preference they have the
highest exposure
from mobile phones highest radiation
exposure high social use does not
necessarily mean high
radiation exposure because when surfing
the mobile phone is far away from the
body
but those activities are related
to less well scoring
on different aspects of health relate
the quality
of life and basically the same pattern
has seen
in a study that we did in south africa
in the western cape region within the
bilateral chair of global and
environmental health
again we saw that medium use was
not really related to low symptoms
but high use had higher sleep
disturbance call
and most important those who reported
that they
are regularly broken up during night to
their
own mobile phone that those
had a much higher sleep disturbance
score
and also more problems with headache so
they had more often
headache when we looked into the
cognitive tests
we actually saw that there was a rather
an improvement in relation to mobile
phone use
mostly moderate e-media users less so
in heavy uses so this indicates
that maybe a bit of mobile phone use
is beneficial as you train yourself as
you get access to
your information so it can be useful for
the education of adolescents
so our conclusions are that our findings
imply that with regard to the education
of adolescents
a vigilant balance is needed to profit
from the beneficial effects
of moderate immediate use on cognition
while preventing the negative side
effects for health related quality of
life
sleep disturbance and headache severity
very very briefly as a last slide
if we have so much exposure to the head
that is the reason why there's also
concern that children may obtain a brain
tumor from mobile phone use
so far there's very little research on
that
there's only one multi-center case
control study
that we have done together with danish
swedish and norwegian researcher
and based on that we could not find
an increased brain tumor risk in our
sample
and this was consistent with incident
right trying
trend analysis you would expect that
nowadays most of adolescents use a
mobile phone
so if it were a strong risk then
basically the incidence of brain tumor
should have increased but this was not
the case
indicating that if there's a risk it
must be a small risk
maybe related to some type of tumors but
it cannot be
a big risk it's very interesting
that this type of time trend analysis
are usually very
weak epidemiological study design but
for these specific questions where we
have a strong increase in exposure
basically no strong other risk factor
except ionizing radiation for brain
tumors
and very good cancer registries in many
countries
this is actually considered to be a very
useful
tool to see and monitor by the childhood
childhood brain tumors are related
to increasing immediate use
so to summarize it's very tricky and we
cannot
finally solve e-media use may have
direct effect on emf on cognitive
function behavior and
symptoms but this may also be because of
content distraction and it
we also have to consider reverse
causality for instance
and here we have some evidence from our
study that
adolescence misbehavior problems tend to
use
e-media more often than those without
such problem and last but not least
latent variables or confounding is also
important
so we found also some indication that
moderate in media use is related to a
better
educational style of the parent more
supportive
so that might be the reason why moderate
eeg
media use has also some beneficial
effect on cognitive function
so to summarize most relevant
electromagnetic field sources
are devices that are operating close to
the body
so usually their own mobile phone
consistent cross-sectional association
has been observed for symptoms
and behavior but not cognitive functions
but they are not really pronounced in
longitudinal
analysis and in objective
recorded data from the mobile phone
operator so this suggests
that associations with symptoms and
behaviors
are more likely reverse
causality the pattern is complex
and probably e-media use
can amplifying existing problems so
if adolescents tend to be addictive
they may be addicted addicted to
immediate use and this may cause
problems in the long run for their
health relate the quality of life or for
their behavior
in particle problematic is nighttime use
and
this has really to be educated the
adolescents that this can be avoided
and these effects were much stronger
than what we have seen for one specific
outcome in our study on memory
which was a relatively small effect so
we can conclude that
non-radiation effects of e-medium
are most likely more relevant than
potential effects
from electromagnetic fields
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