Cell Phones Don't Cause Brain Cancer

You can stop worrying about getting brain cancer from your cell phone. A
massive study of just about every private cell phone user in Denmark shows
no link between gabbing on your mobile and the development of brain tumors.
The 420,000 participants averaged about 8.5 years of cell phone use,
although some of them had been using cell phones for as long as 21 years.
But there was not even a hint of an increase in brain cancer incidence the
longer they used the phone.
A closer examination of different types of brain cancer-from gliomas to
acoutsic neuromas-showed no increase in brain cancer subtypes either,
according to investigators, led by Joachim Schuz of the Institute of Cancer
Epidemiology of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen.
Bizarrely, the cell-phone study, which was published in the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute, showed some unexpected benefits. Male cell phone
users were less likely to develop lung cancer. But that's probably a result
of the fact that the first people to use cell phones in Denmark were quite
well-off, and rich men are less likely to smoke cigarettes than poorer men.
Rich women are just as likely to smoke as poor women in Denmark and so
female cell-phone users were just as likely to develop lung cancer as their
non-cell-phone-user counterparts.
More difficult to explain is the finding that women who had used cell phones
for a long time were more likely to develop cervical cancer and kidney
cancer. Since cervical cancer is typically caused by a sexually transmitted
virus, it's possible, the study authors say, that early adopters were also
more likely to have sex with several partners. But researchers have no
explanation for why there was an uptick in kidney cancer.
The study was funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council and the Danish
Cancer Society.

What it Means:
The largest study to date has found no link between brain cancer and cell
phone use. So if a link does indeed exist, it is likely to be very small.
The results do not necessarily apply to children since anyone under the age
of 18 was excluded from the study. [TM]