Mobile Phones Cleared of Cancer Cause Claims

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 which the study examined, nearly 60,000 patients were diagnosed as suffering from one of these two types of brain tumour.

The finds of the research conclude that "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 find a small, steady increase in brain tumours, but it started in 1974, long before mobile phones existed.

"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.

It's known that brain tumours latency can be up to 30 years, so some consider this absurd to try and draw conclusions from this short period of time. Also, the researchers did not mention age-specific incidence of brain tumours, even though you will see an increase in age-specific incidence of brain tumours before an increase in the general population.

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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