STOCKHOLM : Chatting on a mobile phone before bedtime makes for
more restless nights, a Swedish researcher who headed up a study on
the subject cautioned on Monday.
"If you feel you have trouble sleeping, you should think about not
talking on a mobile phone right before you go to bed," said Bengt
Arnetz, a professor of social medicine and stress research at
Uppsala University, north of Stockholm.
Arnetz, who spoke to AFP in a telephone interview from the United
States, said he and a team of researchers from Sweden's Karolinska
Institute and Wayne State University in Michigan had found that
mobile phone radiation appeared to cause insomnia, headaches and
concentration difficulties.
Over a period of 18 months, the scientists studied 35 men and 36
women between the ages of 18 and 45, intermittently exposing some
to 884 MHz wireless signals, the equivalent of the radiation
received when talking on a cell phone.
Others meanwhile were placed in the same conditions but received
only sham exposure.
"The ones who were exposed reported headaches, it took longer for
them to fall asleep and they did not sleep as well through the
night," Arnetz said, claiming his was the largest study so far on
the subject.
"We had enormous amounts of data," he said, adding that further
study was needed to determine how exactly the radiation was
upsetting sleep patterns. - AFP/de
