Properly Used Cell Phone Won’t Stall Pacemaker Suggestion: Don’t Place Phone In Your Shirt Pocket

Unless you spend a lot of time talking into your shirt pocket, you don’t have to worry much about a cellular phone garbling the signal from a pacemaker to your heart.

A study published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine reports little reason to fear that a cell phone used in the typical manner - pressed against the ear - can interrupt the rhythm of a caller’s pacemaker.

“This study is mainly good news: If the phone is used in the proper position, we see few, if any, problems,” one of the study’s authors, cardiologist David L. Hayes, said in an interview this week from the pacemaker lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

There is some bad news: The researchers found that an activated cellular phone hovering directly over the heart can cause the signal from a pacemaker to go haywire.

“The electrical signal from the phone confuses the pacemaker,” Hayes said. “It can cause the pacemaker to beat faster than appropriate for certain activity, and it could potentially cause the pacemaker to be inhibited.”

In the study of 980 patients, the scientists found interference resulted in undesirable symptoms in 7.2 percent of the tests - but those symptoms happened only when the phone was proximal to the heart. The most common side effect was palpitations, a deleterious fluttering of the heart.

The researchers, whose work was underwritten by the cellular phone industry, discovered problems were more pronounced when the phone received incoming calls than when it was simply turned on.

The doctors’ recommendation: If you have a pacemaker, avoid putting an activated phone in your shirt pocket.

“And when you do use it over the ear,” Hayes said, “probably either ear is safe, but to be even safer, use it over the ear opposite from the pacemaker.”

Take solace in this, too, especially here in South Florida, where the rate of phone fanatics is among the highest in the land: Somebody else chattering close by on a cellular phone won’t cause your pacemaker to go on the fritz.

Unless, of course, it’s from the stress engendered when that other person happens to be driving and talking simultaneously. A study earlier this year in the same medical journal reported that gabbing on the phone quadruples the risk of being in a wreck - equal in danger to sliding behind the wheel drunk.