Upper bound on the biological effects of 50/60 Hz magnetic fields mediated by radical pairs

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Abstract

Prolonged exposure to weak (~1 µT) extremely-low-frequency (ELF, 50/60 Hz) magnetic fields has been associated with an increased risk of childhood leukaemia. One of the few biophysical mechanisms that might account for this link involves short-lived chemical reaction intermediates known as radical pairs. In this report, we use spin dynamics simulations to derive an upper bound of 10 parts per million on the effect of a 1 µT ELF magnetic field on the yield of a radical pair reaction. By comparing this figure with the corresponding effects of changes in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field, we conclude that if exposure to such weak 50/60 Hz magnetic fields has any effect on human biology, and results from a radical pair mechanism, then the risk should be no greater than travelling a few kilometres towards or away from the geomagnetic north or south pole.

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All data generated during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Code files have been provided for Figures 2 and 4.

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Peter J Hore

Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

For correspondence
peter.hore@chem.ox.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8863-570X

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The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.