In the March, 2009 Issue of Clinics

In this number of Clinics we highlight an intriguing study by Narayanan et al., triggered by the tremendous expansion of the use of cellular phones. They exposed Wistar rats to frequent bursts of the vibratory stimulation (no ring tone) produced by cellular phones and found that such stimulus induces a deficit of spatial memory performance using the Morris water maze test. Both groups did exhibit the expected reduction in the time necessary to learn the test but cellular phone exposed rats had significantly higher latencies to reach the target quadrant. They conclude that the cellular phone vibratory stimulus affected the acquisition of learned responses pointing out to a poor spatial navigation of the phone-exposed animals.