Article publication date
May 2025
ARPANSA review date
October 2025
Summary
This Australian human experimental study examined if radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMF) misinformation could impact the release of the stress hormone cortisol and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) symptoms. The study included 144 participants who were randomly assigned to watch either an alarmist video about the harm of RF EMF or an unrelated control video before being either exposed or not exposed to RF EMF in an open label trial. The study tested for participants’ reported non-specific symptoms of exposure, salivary cortisol levels and their belief that RF EMF exposure could cause harm before and after watching the alarmist video. The study found that watching an alarmist video did not increase the rate that participants experience symptoms or increase cortisol levels. The authors concluded that awareness and belief of exposure play a more important role in symptom perception than a physiological release of a stress hormone.
Published in
Health and wellbeing
Link to study
Commentary by ARPANSA
The results are consistent with previous studies reporting that knowledge or awareness of being exposed to RF‐EMF increases symptoms (Eltiti et al 2007, Verrender et al, 2018).. Furthermore, studies have shown that people who report to have EHS cannot detect the presence of RF EMF better than those who don’t report to have EHS (Van Moorselar et al. 2016; Verrender et al. 2018).
One limitation of the study is that the anticipation of the RF EMF exposure, or an increased stress level from being in a new environment, may have already increased the participants cortisol levels (Barthel et al 2025). A habituation period and retesting of the cortisol levels are not mentioned within the study protocol. If cortisol levels remained high throughout the testing period, this may have prevented the testing from being able to show an impact of the alarmist video on cortisol (Nejtek 2002, Barthel et al 2025).
A recent World Health Organization commissioned systematic review (Bosch-Capblanch et al., 2024) concluded that EHS symptoms self-attributed to everyday RF-EMF are more likely to be a result of the nocebo effect. The systematic review also aligns with the advice by ARPANSA and the World Health Organization (WHO) that exposure to the low levels of RF EMF experienced by the public is not the cause of non-specific symptoms experienced by some individuals.
