Do MRI machines cause heart attacks and seizures?

[LaraKnowles]

TL;DR Summary

A bunch of recent studies are coming up saying that fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field causes heart attacks and seizures.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, within the past three years, there have been a myriad of studies all saying that fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field causes heart attacks and other heart problems, due to Earth's magnetic field disrupting the heart's electrical activity. Pretty much every serious health problem you can think of has been correlated with geomagnetic storms.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214552420300080

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.021006

https://biomedscis.com/fulltext/the...tic-disturbance-on-human-health.ID.000203.php

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13769-does-the-earths-magnetic-field-cause-suicides/

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...to-5500-heart-related-deaths-in-a-given-year/

I've even seen studies linking fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field (geomagnetic storms) with the incidence of seizures, schizophrenia, and even Alzheimer's.

So, what about MRI machines? The magnetic field of an MRI machine is a whopping 100,000 times stronger than Earth's, and the fluctuations are much more violent. By comparison, the fluctuations of Earth's magnetic field during even the most severe geomagnetic storms are measured on the order of a few hundred nanoteslas per minute and don't even affect pacemakers (many newer models of pacemaker are MRI-compliant, but most older models aren't).

 

[berkeman]

Thread closed temporarily for review of the references by the Mentors...

 

[berkeman]

After a Mentor discussion, this thread is reopened provisionally. These studies find a weak association, and are in credible publications.

 

[LaraKnowles]

This recent news story, published 2 hours ago popped up on my MSN https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/t...r&cvid=a1612a7a07bb44a0e7e28844b28de6f6&ei=10
[Text copied directly from the linked article removed from post]

I can't tell if this is some New-Age pseudoscience that's become a recent trend.

 

[russ_watters]

This recent news story, published 2 hours ago popped up on my MSN https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/t...r&cvid=a1612a7a07bb44a0e7e28844b28de6f6&ei=10

Is that Russian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBK_Group I won't delete it for now due to interest in figuring it out, but - did that pop up on a front page or a feed? Where, originally, did it come from? Distressing MSN would be using such questionable sources.

 

[LaraKnowles]

Is that Russian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBK_Group I won't delete it for now due to interest in figuring it out, but - did that pop up on a front page or a feed? Where, originally, did it come from? Distressing MSN would be using such questionable sources.

RBC Ukraine.

It popped up on my feed, not sure how far I scrolled down but I'm pretty sure it was next to the top. I've seen dozens of different articles on my MSN feed about geomagnetic storms/solar flares lately, and several of them mentioned how they affect health.

No less than 3 years ago I never saw any mentions of solar flares affecting the health of people on Earth (quite the opposite actually, they often assured readers that they don't affect health, only perhaps things like power grids etc) and I read the news just as much as I did then as I do now. I wonder what's going on.

 

[jrmichler]

If you are truly interested in your health, take a hard look at your total lifestyle - diet, exercise, weight, alcohol, and smoking. I list a few links below. If you read those, you will see that you have a high degree of control over your health and life span. Scare stories about magnetism, solar activity, and sun exposure are just that - scare stories. The fine print in those stories all refer to possible or rare effects. If any of those effects were even a fraction as significant as, for example smoking, the reporting would be a lot different.

Some examples of real effects on your health:

Exercise by itself prevents heart disease: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/encouraging-news-study-finds-physical-181202821.html. Previous studies have proven that ramping up physical activity lowers the risk of death from any cause by 15 to 50%. It also decreases the risk of heart disease by as much as 40%.

Exercise prevents cancer and reduces risk of metastatic cancer by 72%:
Article: https://neurosciencenews.com/aerobic-exercise-cancer-21840/
Paper: https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/...-Exercise-Induced-Metabolic-Shield-in-Distant

Total lifestyle affects how long you live: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-much-exercise-for-longevity-healthier-life

Another study on lifestyle vs heart disease and cancer: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/415827. A quote from the abstract: Those with 4 compared with those with no poor health behaviors had an all-cause mortality risk equivalent to being 12 years older.

Healthy vs unhealthy lifestyle adds 14 years life for women and 12 years for men: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047

 

[Nugatory]

This recent news story, published 2 hours ago popped up on my MSN https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/t...r&cvid=a1612a7a07bb44a0e7e28844b28de6f6&ei=10
[Text copied directly from the linked article removed from post]

A recent news story is not an acceptable source under the forum rules. If we’re continue this discussion we need citations to real peer-reviewed scientific publications. However…

I can't tell if this is some New-Age pseudoscience that's become a recent trend.

Almost certainly.

 

[LaraKnowles]

A recent news story is not an acceptable source under the forum rules. If we’re continue this discussion we need citations to real peer-reviewed scientific publications. However…Almost certainly.

This study is peer reviewed https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214552420300080 published in Life Sciences in Space Research.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.021006 This study is from the Journal of the American Heart Association.

https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-...m_contentnullutm_campaignblog_2019_on-health/

''Our results may be explained through the direct impact of environmental electric and magnetic fields produced during GMD on the human autonomic nervous system. Interactions between GMD and the autonomic nervous system are likely to induce a cascade of reactions in the body's electrophysiology that culminate in the collapse of organ functions and death.''
https://aepi.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42494-020-00019-9 About seizures.

https://biomedscis.com/fulltext/the...tic-disturbance-on-human-health.ID.000203.php

"m) Solar activity may contribute to the development of and be a trigger of the exacerbation of nervous and mental disorders, such schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple sclerosis [38]"

 

[Nugatory]

So, what about MRI machines?

The effects observed in the studies linked above are fairly small, floating at the edge of hinting at the possibility of a statistically significant causal relationship. If there is in fact such a relationship the 100,000 larger and more violent field fluctuations associated with MRI would be expected to some unambiguously detectable effects.

Without a plausible hypothesis for how small field fluctuations produce marginally detectable effects but much larger ones don’t produce more detectable effects, the odds are that this will turn out to be an example of pathological science.

 

[Drakkith]

This seems extremely doubtful. We live in a world where much more powerful magnetic fields than those that hit Earth are commonplace and I'm not aware of any reliable evidence linking them to any of the effects mentioned here except perhaps in the most extreme cases.

 

[LaraKnowles]

Apparently "heliobiology" (which is the topic of geomagnetic storms affecting health) was once regarded as a "pseudoscience", but allegedly isn't anymore if this paper is to be believed:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/temporal-correlation

Quoting the paper:

"The pioneering works were those by Chizhevskii and Piccardi. Some of their papers (e.g., Piccardi, 1962; Chizhevskii, 1976) have laid a dramatic foundation for the further development of heliobiology. It has taken nearly half a century for investigations into helio-geobiocorrelations to be promoted from the status of a “pseudo-science” to, at first, an exotic (Gnevyshev and Oll, 1971) and then to a common domain of scientific research (Shnoll, 1995a). It is quickly becoming one of the hottest fields now."

 

[russ_watters]

Apparently "heliobiology" (which is the topic of geomagnetic storms affecting health) was once regarded as a "pseudoscience", but allegedly isn't anymore if this paper is to be believed:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/temporal-correlation

Google turns up basically nothing for "helio-geobiocorrelations" except that paper and "heliobilogy" very little beyond an initial 70 year old Soviet proposition, so evidently it's not even something that is widely believed to be a potential thing, historically or otherwise, much less been promoted to accepted science. "Magnetobiology" is not a peer reviewed journal, it's a book....from 2002.

 

[Nugatory]

The title question if this thread is "Do MRI machines cause heart attacks and seizures?" and it is clear from the discussion above that there is nowhere near enough good data to have a sensible and fact-based discussion of that question so this thread is closed.

As with all thread closures, if there is more to say in the thread you can PM any mentor to ask that the thread be reopened for your contribution.