HEALTH
The raw materials that our magnets are made from are not detrimental to peoples’ health. However, it is important to recognise that magnets can have a dangerous effect on medical implants such as pacemakers. Also, it is quite common for some people to suffer nickel allergies, usually triggered by wearing of jewellery. As most of our neodymium magnets are coated with nickel, we offer the below advice.
Pacemakers
There is a general lack of understanding regarding how magnets can affect heart pacemakers and implanted heart defibrillators.
At FIRST4MAGNETS, we sought advice from a specialist and the following information represents our best knowledge regarding how heart pacemakers are affected by magnets.
Lindsay Grant (BSc CEng FIET CSci FIPEM ARCP) is a Consultant Clinical Scientist and Head of the Clinical Engineering Department of Medical Physics & Bioengineering at the Royal United Hospital, United Kingdom.
Lindsay kindly gave us this advice: “The operation of heart pacemakers will be affected by the close proximity of a magnet. Magnets can set a pacemaker working in a way that is not suitable for the pacemaker user and that might affect their health. This change will stop when the magnet is removed.”
She added: “The background to this is that magnets are used to put pacemakers into a mode of working that does not respond to the patient's own heart rhythm. We regularly use magnets in our pacemaker clinics to change the working of the pacemaker, to see how it is operating. Each pacemaker manufacturer uses the 'magnet response' of a pacemaker in a different way, so it is impossible to be more precise than the above statement.
“Some manufacturers have a response that makes the pacemaker pace the heart at 100 beats-per-minute or faster. The pacemaker will not usually synchronise with the natural heart beat when a magnet is applied. Although in 20 years’ experience of putting magnets on pacemakers, I have never had a problem, it is theoretically possible to trigger a life threatening heart rhythm by doing so.”
FIRST4MAGNETS thank Lindsay for this clear and valuable advice.
Allergies
Our neodymium magnets are nickel-plated. Nickel is a metal which can cause an allergic reaction in some people who are exposed to long-term contact with objects that release nickel and in most cases, these allergic reactions are triggered by jewellery containing nickel. As a precaution, avoid long-term contact with nickel-plated magnets and totally avoid contact with nickel-plated materials if you already have a nickel allergy. How much or little it takes to trigger a nickel allergy is debatable and changes from person to person.
Medical benefits
Millions of people worldwide wear neodymium magnets to promote health and well-being. We have found no evidence at all of detrimental effects of neodymium magnets on people or animals – many people actually believe that magnets improve health and accelerate healing.
