A Study of Visual Evoked Potential in Nocturnal Mobile Phone Users

Smart phones, a demand of the modern-days have made man addicted to its usage to extent of disrupting his normal sleep wake cycles and make compromises with his biological clock. The overuse of these radiations-emitting devices has proved deleterious to both physical and mental health. As inferences of macular degeneration and ocular inflammation have been reported among the cell phone overuse, this study has been designed to evaluate the visual evoked potential in the nocturnal cell phone users to infer the degree of neuronal impairment in them. This observational study was carried out in the research lab, involving 60 volunteers who were segregated into 4 groups depending upon the duration of cell phone usage overnight and the VEP was recorded in all the 4 groups. The VEP revealed a significant prolongation of N145 wave latency in both eyes of the group that used cell phones more at night. From the observation it could be concluded that overuse of smart phones increases the hazardous outcomes of electromagnetic radiations and blue light emission exposure could have rendered pathological visual processing.