Thermal noise limit on the sensitivity of cellular membranes to power frequency electric and magnetic fields

Oncothermia: a new paradigm and promising method in cancer therapies

In "hypethermia", the procedure of raising the temperature of a part, or the whole body, up to 42 degrees C to kill cancer cells for a defined period of time is applied alone or as an adjunctive with various established cancer treatment modalities such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy. However, "hyperthermia" is not generally accepted as conventional therapy due to the complications of deep heating and lack of focusing of the heat effect only for malignant tissues. The idea of oncothermia solves the selective deep action on malignant tissue on nearly cellular level. Oncothermia is highly improved, safe and effective "hyperthermia" in clinical cancer therapy supported by in vivo, in vitro, and human research as shown in this article. Advantage of oncothermia: while the classical insufficiently, focused "hyperthermia" has to heat up in case of the multiple lesions overlapping all the volume, which contains both normal tissues and malignant tissues; while oncothermia automatically focuses on the malignant tissues in its multiple places, without treating the healthy tissue in between. The modulated radiofrequency current (RF) flows through the malignancies only. The radiofrequency modulated current with 13,56 MHz (fractal modulated) between 2 electrodes automatically focuses through malignant tissues with lower impedance and will flow mainly in the extracellular electrolyte because the normal cells are electronically isolated by their membrane by more than one-million V/m electrical field strength. Oncothermia today has the ability to be a candidate to a widely accepted modality of the standard cancer treatment.

Gauging the strength of power frequency fields against membrane electrical noise

The possible physiological effect of power frequency fields (60 Hz in the US, 50 Hz in most other countries) is still a hotly debated issue. These relatively slow fields distribute themselves across cell membranes and a common approach has been to compare the strength of these fields to the strength of the electric noise that the membrane generates itself through Brownian motion. However, there has been disagreement among researchers on how to evaluate the membrane electric noise. In the first part of this article three major models are discussed. In the second part an ab initio modeling of membrane electric fields finds that different manifestations of Brownian noise lead to an electric noise intensity that is many times larger than what conventional estimates have yielded. Finally, the legitimacy of gauging a nonequilibrium external signal against internal equilibrium noise is questioned.

On the thermal noise limit of cellular membranes

Comparison of thermal noise limits and the effects of low frequency electromagnetic fields (LFEMF) on the cellular membrane have important implications for the study of bioelectro-magnetism in this regime. Over a decade ago, Weaver and Astumian developed a model to show that thermal noise can limit the efficacy of LFEMF. A recent report by Kaune [Kaune (2002) Bioelectromagnetics 23:622-628], however, contradicted their findings. Kaune assumes that the conductance noise current of cell membrane can be decomposed into two components, where one of them is identical regarding all segments (coherent), while the other is different (incoherent). Besides, this decomposition is not unequivocal and contradicts to the statistical independence of the segment noise currents, and therefore to the second law of thermodynamics as well. We suggest the procedure based on the method of symmetrical components, by the means of which we can re-interpret the result of Kaune in a correct way.