Long Suspected of causing brain tumors, cell phones are now being eyed as key allies in the fight against Alzheimer's disease, US researchers said.
Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) found, to their surprise, that 96 mice they zapped twice daily for an hour each time with electromagnetic waves similar to those generated by US mobile phones benefited from the exposure.
Older mice saw deposits of beta-amyloid - a protein fragment that accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer's sufferers to form the disease's signature plaques - wiped out and their memories improved after long term exposure to mobile phones, the study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Diseases showed.
Young adult mice with no apprent signs of memory impairment were protected against Alzheimer's disease after several month's exposure to the phone waves, and the memories of normal mice with no genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's disease were boosted after exposure to the electromagnetic waves.
No one was more surprisedby the results than the researchers themselves, who hab embarked on the tests several years ago, convinced they would show "that the electromagnetic fields from a cell phone would be deleterious to Alzheimer's mice," lead author Gary Arendash, a USF professor, said. "When we got our initial results showing a beneficial effect, I thought, 'Give it a few more months and it will get bad for them'.
"It never got bad . we just kept putting these beneficial effects in both the Alzheimer's and normal mice," he said. It took several months of exposure before the benefits were seen in mice, and that would be the equivalent of many years in humans, Arendash said.
The experts said that more research is needed to find out, among other things, what the optimal "dosage" of electromagnetic waves would be- the 918 megaHerz in European ones, or another frequency - and how long effective "treatment" would have to be.
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