Abstract
A series of experiments on rats have been performed, to study the effects of long time (50 days) exposure to electromagnetic fields of extremely low frequency (ELF, i.e. less than 100 Hz) and amplitude (non thermal), testing whether the metabolic processes would be affected. The background lies on recent observations on the behaviour of isolated enzymes in vitro exposed to EFL fields. In these experiments, the cyclotron (or Larmor) frequency of the metallic ion has been used to "stimulate" the metalloproteins redox-active site, thus obtaining a clear variation of the enzyme functionality. In this paper we have extended for the first time the check to more complex animal metabolism. The novelty of this approach implies that a large amount of data had to be analyzed since it was not possible, in principle, to select only a few parameters among all the potential effects. Several biochemical parameters have been evaluated by comparing their values during the periods of exposure (field ON) and non exposure (field OFF). The evidence that long term exposure to electromagnetic fields with a well defined frequency may have relevant effects on parameters such as body weight, blood glucose and fatty acid metabolism has been obtained.
Highlights
Exposure to artificially generated electromagnetic (e.m.) fields is a common occurrence for a large number of individuals: its biological consequences, still largely unknown, are being studied in experimental animals [14] and in humans [5]
It has been believed for a long time that biological dynamics should be accounted for by classical physics, but this conceptual frame can explain neither the space-time order existing in living matter nor the selectivity of biocomponent interactions
Some of the Authors of the present paper have previously studied the living matter from a physical point of view as long-ordered coherent systems, where the electromagnetic fields play the paramount role of information transducers [6,7,8]
Summary
Exposure to artificially generated electromagnetic (e.m.) fields is a common occurrence for a large number of individuals: its biological consequences, still largely unknown, are being studied in experimental animals [14] and in humans [5]. The body functioning is generally formulated in terms of biomolecules and their interactions; the living state is described in terms of molecular biology According to Zhadin and co-workers [11,12] an ion current exhibits a transient enhancement by applying, parallel to the static field B, an alternating magnetic field Bac, which has a frequency matching the cyclotron frequency fc. Such a mechanism should be a good candidate to explaining the selective enhancement of the ions flow through the cell membranes, and would affect the rate of biochemical reactions and the enzymatic activities
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