Folks partial to a bit of late night nookie chat over their mobile phone may want to take a closer look at new research from scientists at Sweden’s Uppsala University and Karolinska Institute and Wayne State University in Michigan, US.
The boffins studied the effects of using a mobile phone before going up the wooden hill to sleep, and found that people exposed to phone radiation took longer to reach the deeper stages of sleep, and spent less time in that state.
They were also prone to insomnia, headaches and confusion (much like going to bed after a night out on the lash, then).
Thought to be the most comprehensive of its kind, the research looked into the effects of pre-bedtime mobile use on 35 men and 36 women, aged between 18 and 45 and concluded that, “the study indicates that during laboratory exposure to 884 MHz wireless signals components of sleep believed to be important for recovery from daily wear and tear are adversely affected.”
Reporting their findings in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS), the report authors noted that the symptoms of mobile phone radiation were seen in 38 of the 71 study participants.
Dr Chris Idzikowsky, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, added: “There is now more than sufficient evidence from a large number of reputable investigators who are finding that mobile phone exposure an hour before sleep adversely affect deep sleep.”
However, in an interview with The Independent, a spokesperson for the Mobile Manufacturers Forum (MMF) – the industry group who funded the study – insisted that the “results were inconclusive” and that “the researchers did not claim that exposure caused sleep disturbance.”
But then they would say that.