During the recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in use of mobile phones which resulted in an increase of the exposure to electromagnetic radiations in our life. Human saliva is considered as a potential source of biomarkers to monitor changes that occur under pathological conditions. The main objective of the current experiment was to determine the effect of mobile phone radiation on general health, electrolytes and salivary function among Islamic University students who use mobile phones. A questionnaire was designed and applied to 167 healthy and 36 deaf female students to select cases whose meeting the inclusion criteria. A total of 103 students who met the inclusion criteria were included to investigate the influence of mobile phone radiations on their general health. For assessment of salivary parameters, a total of 55 students were chosen and classified into three groups. Group I was the control group, which included 17 deaf students who did not use the mobile phone at all. Group II was healthy students who have mobile phone for less than 5 years. Group III was healthy students who have mobile phone for 5 years or more. Descriptive data that included mean, standard deviation, and percentages was calculated for each group. Multiple group comparisons were made by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Tukey test for pairwise comparisons. Categorical data were analyzed by Chi square (χ2) test. For all the tests, a P value of 0.05 or less was considered for statistical significance. The results showed that the participants who use mobile phone had several problems in their health including dry mouth, bad odor from mouth, drooling of saliva, as well as ear and eye pain. The majority of the participants who use mobile phone complained of headache, anxiety, insomnia and forgetfulness as compared to deaf participants. Also, the study showed that there was no significant difference between salivary pH in all tested groups. Regarding to salivary flow rate, the differences were no significant in all tested groups. In addition, this study has also shown that there was significant difference between the salivary Na+ and K+ levels of the three groups. Salivary level of Na+ and K+ were significantly lower in mobile phone users when compared to non users of mobile phone.
Effect of electromagnetic radiations from mobile phone base stations on general health and salivary function