14 DAY TRIAL // Recent scientific studies have shown that entertainment devices, such as headphones for MP3 players, interfere with medical devices, when the two are in close proximity to each other. The leaders of the current study say that a 3-cm distance should be enough to guarantee no interference between the two classes of equipment.
The Food and Drug Administration said, earlier this year, that there was no risk of influence on pacemakers from the MP3 players themselves. But the effects of the headphones were not accounted for. The reason why William H. Maisel, M.D., M.P.H., director at the Medical Device Safety Institute, from Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston, Mass. decided to investigate the matter was because of the magnets most headphones contain.
In addition, some manufacturers use a substance called neodymium, which the researchers also thought could interfere with medical implants. So they used a test group, comprised of 60 volunteers, to test the effects of several types of headphones on pacemaker and defibrillator patients. Normally, a magnetic field would have to be 10 gauss or above in intensity, in order to affect the devices. The study revealed that some headphones had a magnetic field about 200 gauss strong.
This can cause implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) to stop looking for heart beat anomalies, thus rendering the patients vulnerable to heart problems. The good news is that the electronic equipments only seemed to influence the implants when they were in close proximity. As soon as the headphones were lifted from the chests of test subjects, pacemakers and ICDs resumed their normal operations and showed no further abnormalities.
"Even at those high levels, we did not observe any interactions when the headphones were at least 3 cm, or about 1.2 inches, from the skin's surface. Patients should not focus on the brands we tested but instead should simply be instructed to keep their headphones at least 3 cm from their implantable devices," explained Maisel.