Effects of radiofrequency exposure in aged and Alzheimer’s disease mice: a combined behavioural and neurovascular approach – READ

READ: Effects of radiofrequency exposure in aged and Alzheimer’s disease mice: combined behavioural and neurovascular studies

Environmental exposure to radiofrequency (RF) fields is increasing worldwide due to the development of wireless communications. First confined to mobile telephony networks (base station and mobile phones), exposure is nowadays related to the multiplicity of RF emitting sources, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB equipments. Questions about the sensitivity of specific populations to mobile communications RF signals focus almost exclusively on children and adolescents. However, the elderly represent a significant population, which may be more sensitive to environmental exposures than young adults. This raises the question about the possibility that such exposure to the RF environmental agent could impact the development or progression of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer disease (AD), the most common type of dementia in the elderly.
This 4-year basic-science project aims at investigating the effects of Wi-Fi radiofrequency (RF) exposures during normal and pathological ageing. By using a combined behavioural and neurovascular approach in rodents (use of transgenic mice reproducing symptoms of the AD pathology and aged mice), the current proposal seeks to explore whether deleterious effects of RF exposure on neurovascular functions can be exacerbated in aged and AD rodents as compared to normal adults. This research axis has just been selected as of “high priority” by the expert group of WHO that updated the research agenda for RF bioeffects (WHO, 2010).
The three READ partners are physicists and neuroscientists. They are located in adjacent buildings at the Bordeaux University and have very complementary expertises and equipments. They have organized the work into seven tasks including task 0 for coordination and task 6 for dissemination. Task 1 deals with the preparation of the double-mutation transgenic mice, task 2 with the exposure of the animals to the RF fields (Wi-Fi) and task 3, 4, and 5 with behaviour, biomarkers, and cerebro-vascular functions, respectively.
If detrimental effects are found in aged or AD mice, it will imply that the sensitivity threshold to RF fields should be reduced during normal or pathological ageing. Accordingly, such findings would question the validity of exposure limits currently at use and call for a re-evaluation of these limits to take into account differential thresholds among population subtypes.