Article publication date
December 2025
ARPANSA review date
25/03/2026
Summary
The BERENIS report briefly presents key findings of systematic reviews (SRs), commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO), on the health risk of radiofrequency-electromagnetic field (RF‑EMF) exposure. It also highlights research gaps and provides future recommendations for conducting more robust studies to better support future evidence synthesis in this topic. The 12 SRs assessed health effects associated with RF-EMF exposure, such as cancer, reproductive and birth outcomes, cognitive impairment, electromagnetic hypersensitivity symptoms, and oxidative stress.
The SRs assessing human observational studies on cancer, cognition, reproduction, and symptoms did not identify evidence of adverse health effects associated with RF‑EMF exposure. The confidence in the evidence for mobile phone use and brain tumours in particular was rated as moderate. However, the available data for most outcomes were limited and the overall confidence in the evidence was low. Animal research showed mixed findings. Some reproductive effects, such as reduced birth weight and reduced male fertility, were supported by moderate confidence though these findings were not reflected in human studies. Cancer findings in animals, mainly derived from the National Toxicological Program (NTP) and Ramazzini studies, indicated increased schwannomas and gliomas with moderate to high confidence, though these arose under whole‑body, high‑dose exposures not comparable to realistic low-level human daily exposures. Evidence synthesised from the SRs for oxidative stress was inconsistent and mostly low‑confidence. The report indicated that current evidence does not allow conclusions about whether certain individuals are more vulnerable to RF‑EMF exposure than the general population. Studies involving people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity have not clarified increased susceptibility, and most observational studies include whole populations without the ability to identify small, sensitive subgroups. It remains challenging to assess subgroup vulnerability or to generalize findings beyond the populations typically studied.
The BERENIS report notes that many RF‑EMF studies included in the SRs have significant methodological weaknesses, such as poor exposure assessment and inadequate experimental design, which reduces confidence in their findings and makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions on potential health effects. The report also identifies major knowledge gaps, including the need for higher‑quality studies, improved exposure assessment, mechanistic research on thermal and non‑thermal effects, and long‑term prospective human studies. The need for high‑quality mechanistic studies across most research areas could help better comprehend how RF‑EMF exposure interacts at the molecular levels. The BERENIS recommends maintaining Switzerland’s precautionary approach to limit exposures since these SRs do not justify changes to exposure guidelines.
Published in
BERENIS Newsletter – Special Issue, December 2025
Link to study
Assessment of WHO-commissioned systematic reviews on health effects of RF-EMF
ARPANSA commentary
ARPANSA has previously reviewed the WHO SRs (for example: ARPANSA 2023, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c, 2024d, 2024e, 2024f, 2025). The overall assessment of ARPANSA on these SRs is that there is no substantiated evidence that low-level RF-EMF exposure encountered by the general public or workers poses any health risks in human populations. ARPANSA also acknowledges that much of the research has significant methodological issues related to exposure assessment, experimental design or statistical analysis resulting in low confidence in in some of the results. Therefore, it recommends quality future studies on this topic.
One particular SR which investigated cancer in experimental animals (i.e., Mevissen et al., 2025) notably has several methodological flaws, including not doing an appropriate synthesis of all the evidence and giving undue weight to the NTP study (Karipidis et al., 2026). The NTP study per se was previously critiqued for methodological and analytical flaws (see ARPANSA’s commentary on the NTP study). This flawed SR has been recently revisited by the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Belenki et al., 2026) and their re-analysis disagreed with the conclusions drawn in the SR regarding positive findings for brain and heart cancers in exposed rats. It was highlighted that the SR deviated from their agreed study protocol eventually resulting in flawed results. More recently, two international co-ordinated studies, one conducted in Korea (Kim et al., 2026) and the other in Japan (Imaida et al., 2026) ruled out the risk of cancers, DNA damage or chromosomal aberrations in RF-EMF exposed rats. Therefore, these emerging findings were published post Mevissen et al.’s SR and they do not substantiate the results previously reported by the NTP study.
The WHO-commissioned SRs on RF-EMF exposure and health risk provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art evidence on the topic and their findings reinforce ARPANSA’s advice that RF-EMF exposure below the limits recommended in the Australian Standard (RPS-S1) does not pose any health risks.
