New cellphone-cancer link study says “nej”

After the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that it was officially rating cellphones as a possible carcinogen category 2B (along with certain types of pickles, coffee and carpentry) the mediasphere lit up, with a mixture of luddites saying “See! Ban them!”, and a mixture of gadgetophiles saying, “They’re just hedging their bets, it proves nothing”.

Now a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology has examined incidence of tumours of the brain in 2.9 million adult Danes that have been using mobiles for 11 to 15 years. The study found no evidence that shows a correlation between cellphone use and a type of brain tumour, never mind a clear link. In fact, they couldn’t even find an increase in the chance of the tumour being in right hand side of the head (the most common side for people to hold their phones).

The gist from the abstract:
In this study including 2.9 million subjects, a long-term mobile phone subscription of ≥11 years was not related to an increased vestibular schwannoma risk in men, and no vestibular schwannoma cases among long-term subscribers occurred in women versus 1.6 expected. Vestibular schwannomas did not occur more often on the right side of the head, although the majority of Danes reported holding their mobile phone to the right ear. Vestibular schwannomas in long-term male subscribers were not of larger size than expected. Overall, no evidence was found that mobile phone use is related to the risk of vestibular schwannoma.

More detail and comment from the study leader can be found in the Reuters report.

The IARC study was already controversial as it is a ‘meta study’ of a number of other studies and was largely inconclusive, but still resulted in the “just in case” recategorization. One of the key pieces of data was the most recent Interphone study, which was almost immediately challenged more or less the minute it walked out the door.

And almost immediately that this latest research has come out, a lobby group has declared them to be stooges of the cellphone industry. Seeing as the particular research group does work for the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNRP) Standing Committee on Epidemiology, which is funded by the GSM Association, it’s clearly part of an industry conspiracy (note: they didn’t challenge the research, just the researchers).

With this latest development, we continue to gather inconclusive or contradictory studies that generally show no definite link, but with some showing the real possibility of their being a real possibility of a link. Even this latest “no it doesn’t” study admits that the tumours studied (vestibular schwannomas) grow very slowly, and more time needs to pass to be sure. There’s also the suspicion that maybe young children would be more susceptible to the mobile’s non-ionising radiation. But there is nothing concrete here yet.

So the good news is that mobile phones definitely and clearly do not definitely or clearly cause brain cancer, almost certainly no more than certain types of pickles popular in Asia. But they may. Because nothing is impossible.

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American Journal of Epidemiology source

Abstract
Vestibular schwannomas grow in the region within the brain where most of the energy by radiofrequency electromagnetic fields from using mobile phones is absorbed. The authors used 2 Danish nationwide cohort studies, one a study of all adult Danes subscribing for a mobile phone in 1995 or earlier and one on sociodemographic factors and cancer risk, and followed subjects included in both cohorts for occurrence of vestibular schwannoma up to 2006 inclusively. In this study including 2.9 million subjects, a long-term mobile phone subscription of ≥11 years was not related to an increased vestibular schwannoma risk in men (relative risk estimate = 0.87, 95% confidence interval: 0.52, 1.46), and no vestibular schwannoma cases among long-term subscribers occurred in women versus 1.6 expected. Vestibular schwannomas did not occur more often on the right side of the head, although the majority of Danes reported holding their mobile phone to the right ear. Vestibular schwannomas in long-term male subscribers were not of larger size than expected. Overall, no evidence was found that mobile phone use is related to the risk of vestibular schwannoma. Because of the usually slow growth of vestibular schwannoma and possible diagnostic delay, further surveillance is indicated.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) image of vestibular schwannoma.
Jaiswal et al. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 2009 8:9 doi:10.1186/1477-5751-8-9