Exposure to 1800 MHz LTE electromagnetic fields under proinflammatory conditions decreases the response strength and increases the acoustic threshold of auditory cortical neurons

Abstract

Increased needs for mobile phone communications have raised successive generations (G) of wireless technologies, which could differentially affect biological systems. To test this, we exposed rats to single head-only exposure of a 4G long-term evolution (LTE)-1800 MHz electromagnetic field (EMF) for 2 h. We then assessed the impact on microglial space coverage and electrophysiological neuronal activity in the primary auditory cortex (ACx), under acute neuroinflammation induced by lipopolysaccharide. The mean specific absorption rate in the ACx was 0.5 W/kg. Multiunit recording revealed that LTE-EMF triggered reduction in the response strength to pure tones and to natural vocalizations, together with an increase in acoustic threshold in the low and medium frequencies. Iba1 immunohistochemistry showed no change in the area covered by microglia cell bodies and processes. In healthy rats, the same LTE-exposure induced no change in response strength and acoustic threshold. Our data indicate that acute neuroinflammation sensitizes neuronal responses to LTE-EMF, which leads to an altered processing of acoustic stimuli in the ACx.

The effect of exposure to radiofrequency LTE signal and coexposure to mitomycin‐C in Chinese hamster lung fibroblast V79 cells

“…The latter relies on a fully digital Internet protocol‐based technology called long‐term evolution (LTE) operating in the frequency range from 800 to 2600 MHz. Moreover, despite the very recent transition from the 4G to 5G network, 4G LTE is still the most frequently used signal in wireless communication (Rappaport et al, 2013; Souffi et al, 2022).…”

“…By referring more specifically to investigations addressing 4G systems, only a few experimental studies are available in the literature, and the majority of them has been carried out in vivo. Most of them report on the effects on brain function in both rat models (Ozdemir et al, 2021; Souffi et al, 2022) and human subjects (Lv et al, 2014; Vecsei et al, 2018; Wei et al, 2019; Yang et al, 2017, 2021). Alterations on behavior (Broom et al, 2019), fertility (Hasan et al, 2021; Oh et al, 2018; Yu et al, 2020), and hematological parameters (Hasan et al, 2021) have also been reported in mice models.…”