Mobile phones & cancer: the headlines are wrong again

By Stuart Corner
Saturday, 27 January 2007 12:53

Opinion and Analysis

The topic of mobile phones and cancer is highly emotive, and very important. The majority of research to date has shown no links but there have been some disturbing exceptions, always disputed and denigrated by the cellular industry. Erroneous and emotive headlines do not help.

Take this one from an Australian newspaper reporting on new research findings. "Mobile users 'may grow brain tumours' - People who use mobile phones for more than a decade are far more likely to grow brain tumours on the side of their head, new research shows."

The story was prompted by a study, to be published later this year in the International Journal of Cancer, undertaken by The Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Finland. It compared the mobile phone use of 1521 people with gliomas with that of 3301 people without them. Gliomas are tumours that develop in a type of brain cell called glial cells, or sometimes glia, or neuralgia.

So what did the research actually find? According to a published abstract of the study,  "We found no evidence of increased risk of glioma related to regular mobile phone use. No significant association was found across categories with duration of use, years since first use, cumulative number of calls or cumulative hours of use. When the linear trend was examined, the odds ratio for cumulative hours of mobile phone use was 1.006...per 100 hrs, but no such relationship was found for the years of use or the number of calls. We found no increased risks when analogue and digital phones were analysed separately."

So where did that headline come from? Well the researchers went on to say. "For more than 10 years of mobile phone use reported on the side of the head where the tumour was located, an increased odds ratio of borderline statistical significance (OR = 1.39) was found, whereas similar use on the opposite side of the head resulted in an odds ratio of 0.98.