1. INTRODUCTION
In the recent past, the scientific interest in investigat- ing the effects of the continuous exposure to low-power and low-frequency Radio Frequency (RF) signals on biological systems experienced a significant increase. Electromagnetic (EM) fields generated by portable devices such as cellular phones interact with every day of the human life giving
∗This work was carried out during the first author’s tenure as an ERCIM “Alain Bensoussan” Fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is part of the MELODY Project, which is funded by the Research Coun- cil of Norway (Contract no. 187857/S10). Corresponding author: (fabio.mesiti@iet.ntnu.no)
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rise to growing public concern for the impact on the hu- man health. Biological alterations and unpredictable effects on the cognitive-memory system of the human brain have been experimented and reported in the literature, where a large amount of results, often discordant, has been pre- sented. Clearly, the existing works emphasized the negative effects arising from continuous RF exposure without focus- ing on the possible positive effects, healthy indeed, which can be triggered by the interaction of EM fields with the biological structure of living tissues, with particular interest in the neuronal system. Recent experiments, reported in [2], which is worth of scientific attention, dealt with the interac- tions between mobile phone RF radiations and the course of the Alzheimer’s disease, a particular severe form of neurode- generative disorder which is expected to affect growing parts of the population in the future, as predicted by the World Health Organization (WHO, http://www.who.int). Aren- dash and his team [2] experimented on transgenic Alzheimer mice improved cognitive behaviour after whole-body expo- sure of the animals to long-term RF signals generated by CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile phones. Par- ticularly, the low-frequency components seemed to play an important role. A partial regression of the disease can also be predicted after longer term exposure. Whether these re- sults can be useful for future treatment of Alzheimer’s is still unclear and the debate is on. However, the experiment highly motivated our investigation to understand the im- pact of structured RF signals, emitted by mobile phones, on the biological mechanisms responsible, as the first thing, of the cognitive functions. To this end, our main purpose in this paper is to pinpoint the keypoints of an interdisci- plinary analysis, proposing an alternative strategy in finding the hidden mechanisms behind the biomedical alterations induced by electromagnetic radiations. We propose to in- tegrate the classical communication paradigm of RF signals analysis in the context of neuronal systems and networks. Understanding the impact of the modulation frequencies, ra- diated power and duration on neurons and neural networks in the context of improved cognition, then a non-invasive, non-pharmacologic therapeutic use of RF radiations in treat- ing human Alzheimer patients may become viable.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes in short the impact of RF exposure on cognitive system and Alzheimer’s disease. In Section 3 the proposed communi- cation structure of the neuronal system is presented, while Section 4 describes the analytical RF-neuronal framework for different neuronal layers. Possible strategies in develop-