Research Gives Phones A Clean Bill of Health

A Scandinavian survey shows that we be can sure that cell phones are safe. This conclusion comes from analysis of trends in brain cancer in Northern European countries up to 2003, which did not tie any trends in to the actual patterns of use of cell phones.

Researchers analyzed annual incidence rates of the two major types of brain tumours-glioma and meningioma-among adults aged 20 to 79 from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1974 to 2003.

Over the 30 years of the study, nearly 60,000 patients were diagnosed as suffering from brain tumours.

The research states “In Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the use of mobile phones increased sharply in the mid-1990s; thus, time trends in brain tumours incidence after 1998 may provide information about possible tumours risks associated with mobile phone use,”.

They did observe a small, steady increase in brain tumours during this time, which started in 1974, long before mobile phones became a factor. There are many other more relevant factors that this increase can be attributed to such as improved life expectancy.

“No change in incidence trends were observed from 1998 to 2003,” researchers stated. This would be when tumours should begin to emerge if they were caused by mobile phone radiation. This is based on the assumption that it took five to 10 years for a tumour to develop?

It is feasibly possible, Deltour’s team wrote, that it takes longer than 10 years for tumours caused by mobile phones to turn up, that the tumours are too rare in this group to show a useful trend, or that there are trends but they are in subgroups too small to be measured in the study, however these weaknesses are common in research and such trends would buck the evidence presented as yet.

However it is true that the latency of brain tumours can be up to 30 years, so it may be considered absurd to try and draw conclusions from this short period of time. Also, the research did not analyse age-specific incidences of brain tumours, even though it would be possible to detect an increase in age-specific incidence of brain tumours before an increase in the population at large.

Following on this point, the research data has been collected and available up until 2007, but the researchers cut the analysis off at 2003. This is being re examined to determine if the extra four years of data would alter the study results in a significant manner.

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