Abstract
Neurophysiological effect of human exposure to radiofrequency signals has attracted considerable attention, which was claimed to have an association with a series of clinical symptoms. A few investigations have been conducted on alteration of brain functions, yet no known research focused on intrinsic connectivity networks, an attribute that may relate to some behavioral functions. To investigate the exposure effect on functional connectivity between intrinsic connectivity networks, we conducted experiments with seventeen participants experiencing localized head exposure to real and sham time-division long-term evolution signal for 30 min. The resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected before and after exposure, respectively. Group-level independent component analysis was used to decompose networks of interest. Three states were clustered, which can reflect different cognitive conditions. Dynamic connectivity as well as conventional connectivity between networks per state were computed and followed by paired sample t-tests. Results showed that there was no statistical difference in static or dynamic functional network connectivity in both real and sham exposure conditions, and pointed out that the impact of short-term electromagnetic exposure was undetected at the ICNs level. The specific brain parcellations and metrics used in the study may lead to different results on brain modulation.
Highlights
Wireless communication technology has evolved drastically in the past 20 years
The results indicated that the peak SAR averaged over a 10-g mass was below 2.00 W/kg for all subjects during real exposure (Figure 3), with a mean ± standard deviation as 1.22 ± 0.24 W/kg
State 1 was similar to State 2, which showed a weak connectivity within each intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) and demonstrated no strong connectivity between ICNs
Summary
Wireless communication technology has evolved drastically in the past 20 years. The emergence of the fourth generation (4G) wireless communication technology promoted the widespread applications of mobile network, and vice versa, and 4G rapidly became the popularly used wireless network. The unprecedentedly increasing exposure to radiofrequency (RF) field provoked public anxieties, especially over the effect on neurophysiological function [1]. By the end of the third quarter of 2020, 5G network had already been commercially deployed in many countries for 1 year, there were still 5.82 billion 4G subscriptions (accounting for 62.1% of global subscription) [2]. It is necessary to investigate the exposure effect of 4G wireless signal.
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