Link Between Cell Phones and Brain Cancer Inconclusive

Link Between Cell Phones and Brain Cancer Inconclusive: Reading Between the Headlines

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? According to a CTV news report on May 17th, 2010, (http://bit.ly/cvB6yj), a recently published study in the International Journal of Epidemiology, called Interphone, found that the connection between cell phones and brain cancer remains inconclusive.  

Although I do not (yet) have access to the actual Interphone study, I did some follow up research to “read between the headlines”.
   
According to Steven Novella, an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, the findings from Interphone illustrate that there is still no clear association between cell phones and cancer (http://bit.ly/c6ia1B).

Although the study did find that, from the 10,000 people studied, there was a 40% increase in risk of getting a brain tumor among the top 10% of mobile phone users. Novella argues that these results were disregarded because of questionable methodology. Novella points out that many of the participants of this study reported improbable amounts of cell phone use – such as 12 hours per day. This data did not provide an accurate account of cell phone use and may have skewed the results.

However, when the data is looked at with number of calls made instead of time per day, the data made more sense and showed no correlation between cell phone use and brain tumours.

Surprisingly, the study also found that average cell phone users had a 20% lower risk of getting cancer. This data was also disregarded due to statistical anomalies that can often occur in this type of research.   

Although this study has several other shortcomings, including only studying cell phone use over a ten to fifteen year period, and only studying adults rather than children who may be more at risk, it still remains inconclusive whether or not cell phone use causes cancer.