Does mobile phone use of women during pregnancy cause hearing problems in infants? Preliminary observation

Objective Some studies have claimed that long-term conversation with mobile phones can cause hearing loss. However, it has not been investigated whether exposure to mobile phones during pregnancy affects the hearing of babies in the womb. Therefore, the aim of this human study was to investigate the effects of intrauterine radiofrequency radiation (RFR) exposure emitted from mobile phones on the hearing of newborns. Methods The study population comprised 149 newborns. Pregnant women in this study were divided into 4 groups according to RFR exposure duration, such as non-exposure to RFR, exposure to RFR for 2–15 min/day, exposure to RFR for 15–60 min/day, and exposure to RFR for more than 60 min/day. The results of the hearing screening analyses of the newborns, which were performed using transiently evoked otoacoustic emission and auto auditory brainstem response, were investigated retrospectively. Results The results of this study indicated that 900 and 1800 MHz RFR exposure during pregnancy did not cause hearing loss in newborns. Conclusion In conclusion, we observed that the hearing sensitivity and peripheral sound perception of newborns were not affected by RFR exposure emitted from mobile phones during the intrauterine period. Further studies should be performed to illuminate the subject

Evolution of clinical characteristics of patients with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria treated with eculizumab in turkey: a multicenter retrospective analysis

Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) is a rare X-linked genetic disorder. On the contrary to its name, it is a multisystemic disease and various symptoms other than hemoglobinuria could be occurred. It could be life threatening especially because of thromboembolic events. In the last decade, a terminal complement inhibition with eculizumab approved with promising results for PNH patients. We conducted this study to evaluate the long term experience of eculizumab therapy from Turkey for the first time. Our cohort included 138 patients with PNH treated with eculizumab between January 2008 and December 2018 at 28 centers in Turkey. Laboratory and clinical findings at the time of diagnosis and after eculizumab therapy were recorded retrospectively. The median age was 39 (range 18-84) years and median granulocyte PNH clone size was 74% (range 3.06-99.84%) at the time of diagnosis. PNH with bone marrow failure syndrome was detected in 49 patients and the rest of 89 patients had classical PNH. Overall 45 patients (32.6%) had a history of any prior thrombotic event before eculizumab therapy and only 2 thrombotic events were reported during the study period. Most common symptoms are fatigue (75.3%), hemoglobinuria (18.1%), abdominal pain (15.2%) and dysphagia (7.9%). Although PNH is commonly related with coombs negativity, we detected coombs positivity in 2.17% of patients. Seven months after the therapy, increased hemoglobin level was seen and remarkably improvement of lactate dehydrogenase level during the treatment was occurred. In addition to previous studies, our real life data support that eculizumab is well tolerated with no serious adverse events and improves the PNH related findings