Abstract
Individuals with idiopathic environmental illness with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF) claim they experience adverse symptoms when exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from mobile telecommunication devices. However, research has consistently reported no relationship between exposure to EMFs and symptoms in IEI-EMF individuals. The current study investigated whether presence of symptoms in IEI-EMF individuals were associated with a nocebo effect. Data from two previous double-blind provocation studies were re-analyzed based on participants’ judgments as to whether or not they believed a telecommunication base station was “on” or “off”. Experiment 1 examined data in which participants were exposed to EMFs from Global System for Mobile Communication, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, and sham base station signals. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to EMFs from Terrestrial Trunked Radio Telecommunications System and sham base station signals. Our measures of subjective well-being indicated IEI-EMF participants consistently reported significantly lower levels of well-being, when they believed the base station was “on” compared to “off”. Interestingly, control participants also reported experiencing more symptoms and greater symptom severity when they too believed the base station was “on” compared to “off”. Thus, a nocebo effect provides a reasonable explanation for the presence of symptoms in IEI-EMF and control participants.
Highlights
Idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF), formerly electrosensitivity, is an illness comprising medically unexplained symptoms in which individuals have a strongly held belief that their symptoms are caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) (Hillert et al, 2006)
Independent samples t-tests resulted in no significant age difference between IEI-EMF and control participants in the sham-Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) or sham-Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) analyses, but there was a significant age difference with controls being significantly older than IEI-EMF participants for the GSM-UMTS analysis
Chi-square analysis resulted in no significant difference between the IEI-EMF participants and controls in proportion of concordant judgments or order of exposure for any of the three analyses: sham-GSM, sham-UMTS, or GSM-UMTS
Summary
Idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF), formerly electrosensitivity, is an illness comprising medically unexplained symptoms in which individuals have a strongly held belief that their symptoms are caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) (Hillert et al, 2006). Neither controls nor IEI-EMF participants can correctly judge when they are receiving real exposure compared to sham (Eltiti et al, 2007a; Kwon and Hämäläinen, 2010; Röösli et al, 2010; Rubin et al, 2010; Wallace et al, 2010) Given this lack of evidence to support their deeply held belief, the question of what is causing the very real and often disabling IEI-EMF symptoms remains. Van den Bergh et al (2017) have proposed that the presence of symptoms in IEI individuals are the result of two processes: (a) prior expectations amplify imprecise benign physiological inputs and (b) symptoms become associated with environmental factors that eventually lead to a nocebo response via interoceptive conditioning
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