4 ms·

This thread would be much shorter if someone had read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230

by Gnarl 7y ago

Gnarl 7y ago
and also this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already. The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous. The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.
  - Gnarl 7y ago
    Oops, didn't realize 1st paper had been paywalled. Try here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative_mechanisms_of_biological_activity_of_low-intensity_radiofrequency_radiation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...
- mcguire 7y ago
  Keep in mind that many readers here are involved in these technologies. Any safety issues would directly or indirectly harm their interests. Alternatively, some likely feel they understand radio frequency radiation and know a-priori that it is safe; "why, I have carried a phone for years and I've never been nuked like a microwave burrito." It's an interesting comparison with the vaping thread last week or the week before, where a similar number of comments came to the conclusion that it should be heavily restricted because we don't have enough data.
  - mc32 7y ago
    That’s a bit unfair. We do have data pointing to vaping causing direct harm (and leading up to death) to people at regular dosage rates. That said, caution should be observed when data points to potential issues.
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  These are good things to read to understand a consensus that yes, electromagnetic radiation has biological effects. For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome). If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it). I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking. However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real. This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world. Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might. A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.
  - godelski 7y ago
    > A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR Do people also assume that EM radiation is a linear no threshold? Because we know it isn't true for ionizing radiation, but it is a great model to use in practice because it overestimates harm (which we'd rather over estimate than under). I've read a few of those papers on the EM radiation on mice and they seem to assume a LNT model, which doesn't seem all that honest to me. A few of the papers I read didn't have great p-values either and had drastically differing rates of cancer development for radiation levels and sex (IIRC one big one had high cancer rates for low power, nothing for medium, and moderate cancer rates for high power. Which there was no explanation to this. But that might have just been one bad paper).
vardump 7y ago
Bad formatting in that paper makes it very hard to read. Overall it seemed to have pretty strong cherry picking feel. Are you sure this paper is objective?
monomyth 7y ago
Or not if someone would read this https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3251 https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3251
- Gnarl 7y ago
  Perhaps you don't appreciate how a review looking at 100 different setups & methods and 93 of those all arriving at the same endpoint (RF leads to oxidative stress) represents FAR stronger evidence than a single study showing the opposite under very specific conditions.

This thread would be much shorter if someone had read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230

by Gnarl 7y ago

This thread would be much shorter if someone had read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230

Gnarl 7y ago

and also this: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914

Junk_Collector 7y ago
Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already. The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous. The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.
- Gnarl 7y ago
  Oops, didn't realize 1st paper had been paywalled. Try here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative_mechanisms_of_biological_activity_of_low-intensity_radiofrequency_radiation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...
mcguire 7y ago
Keep in mind that many readers here are involved in these technologies. Any safety issues would directly or indirectly harm their interests. Alternatively, some likely feel they understand radio frequency radiation and know a-priori that it is safe; "why, I have carried a phone for years and I've never been nuked like a microwave burrito." It's an interesting comparison with the vaping thread last week or the week before, where a similar number of comments came to the conclusion that it should be heavily restricted because we don't have enough data.
- mc32 7y ago
  That’s a bit unfair. We do have data pointing to vaping causing direct harm (and leading up to death) to people at regular dosage rates. That said, caution should be observed when data points to potential issues.
doctorpangloss 7y ago
These are good things to read to understand a consensus that yes, electromagnetic radiation has biological effects. For people reading this stuff, always search for something called the Odds Ratio (OR), which is a gold standard way of comparing how clinically significant a thing is. For example, smoking has an OR of 60 for lung cancer. A well covered paper on birth control suggested its OR for developing depression is 1.26, and the massive aspirin on heart health study had 0.95 OR of cardiovascular disease in one of the surveyed counties (ie aspirin improved clinical outcome). If error bars on measured OR contain 1.0 you can’t say if it is helpful or harmful. OR accounts for baseline incidence in a way that RR (relative risk) does not. So it lets you actually choose among behaviors instead of within diseases or outcomes. It informs why it’s possible to tell everyone they shouldn’t smoke (OR is very high), keep taking birth control (because depression outcome is better than unwanted or complicated pregnancy outcomes), and aspirin for cardiovascular disease prophylaxis (very limited side effects, very cheap so even 0.95 is worth it). I don’t know if there’s a consensus that electromagnetic radiation from electronics has clinical significance. If there is clinical significance it will be a small OR for most outcomes. It won’t be comparable at all to e.g. smoking. However this is still an imperfect measure. In Japan OR for lung disease from smoking is 15, 4 times better than the US. The researchers speculated this has to do with a specific filter on common Japanese cigarettes but it could be genetics or other things that they didn’t control for (ie BMI and gender matching but not Japanese ancestry). So technology can have huge effects on clinical outcomes but 4x 15 is a much bigger deal than 4x 1.015. My point is that it has its limitations but OR definitely measures something real. This is a robust framework for evaluating how this research matters to you in a way that does not require conspiracies or investigating the researcher’s backgrounds. Additionally it is widely accepted by legitimate medical practitioners across the world. Under this framework, the reviews posted here do not document clinical significance, although individual papers cited in them might. A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR (high RR in mice vs placebo is strong research evidence just not strong clinical evidence). So mouse OR isn’t often predicative of human OR. But this applies to chart reviews too. Still a pretty durable framework.
- godelski 7y ago
  > A big limitation is that mice are tested with orders of magnitude higher incidence rate of the disease to quickly find RR Do people also assume that EM radiation is a linear no threshold? Because we know it isn't true for ionizing radiation, but it is a great model to use in practice because it overestimates harm (which we'd rather over estimate than under). I've read a few of those papers on the EM radiation on mice and they seem to assume a LNT model, which doesn't seem all that honest to me. A few of the papers I read didn't have great p-values either and had drastically differing rates of cancer development for radiation levels and sex (IIRC one big one had high cancer rates for low power, nothing for medium, and moderate cancer rates for high power. Which there was no explanation to this. But that might have just been one bad paper).

vardump 7y ago

Bad formatting in that paper makes it very hard to read. Overall it seemed to have pretty strong cherry picking feel. Are you sure this paper is objective?

monomyth 7y ago

Or not if someone would read this https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3251 https://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3251

Gnarl 7y ago
Perhaps you don't appreciate how a review looking at 100 different setups & methods and 93 of those all arriving at the same endpoint (RF leads to oxidative stress) represents FAR stronger evidence than a single study showing the opposite under very specific conditions.