Do Mobile/Cell phones cause brain cancer?

[AussieNeil]

With a CLL diagnosis, our increased risk secondary cancers becomes a concern.  So understandably, many of us look at what we can do to reduce our risk of developing secondary cancers.  This article by Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney may prove reassuring to anyone concerned at the risk of brain cancer from their phone.

New study: no increase in brain cancer across 29 years of mobile use in Australia

theconversation.com/new-stu...

Further to what's mentioned in the article and comments, here are some relevant facts:

Mobile/Cell phones work on a range of frequencies in the billions of Hertz (GigaHertz) region, as do cordless phones, WiFi and....microwave ovens.

Radio waves at these frequencies are not able to cause ionization, which is what is needed to cause DNA damage. You need far higher frequency electromagnetic radiation to do that - the million times greater high ultra-violet frequencies, which are beyond visible light.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioniz...

Hence if mobile phones were responsible for causing cancers, it would be from the heating effect of the radiation.

Interesting comparison; if you were to sun bake at midday, you'd be exposing your body to about as much radiation from the sun as is put out your kitchen microwave oven.

The maximum power output from a mobile phone is around 2 watts or 1/500th of that put out by a microwave oven - and only a small part of that 2 watts is absorbed by your body, with the rest radiating out in all directions to reach the cell/mobile tower.

Here's a table of typical wireless power levels: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm

Mobile/cell phones automatically adjust the transmitted power to the minimum required to guarantee a reliable connection.  That's done to extend talk time and hence the time between battery recharges, but it also reduces the amount of radiation you receive.  That means you get the most radiation from your phone when you have a poor signal.

Mobile/cell phones keep in regular contact with the nearest base station, so if you are travelling around, you remain connected to the tower providing the best signal to ensure calls and SMS messages can be made and received.  That only requires occasional short transmissions or handshakes of a second or so compared to the minutes used in a call.  (Incidentally, I've recently moved from being on the very limits of mobile reception to where I have good mobile reception - and I've found I can go twice as long between recharges when I'm not using my phone.)

In closing, I think we can safely say that far, far more lives are saved because mobile phones enable us to get urgently needed medical help promptly.

Neil

Photo: NOT a mobile/cell phone tower, but a microwave tower providing a link to a country exchange silhouetted at sunset.  Microwave communication transmissions have been in use since the late 1940's...

[SeymourB]

Great post, Neil!

It's easy while watching and waiting to work up a theoretical worry about one behavior or another, especially about technology.

I am an amateur radio operator (KE5JUR), and also worked at a communication station and a radio laboratory in the U.S. Coast Guard back in the 1970s. I am very concerned about radio and radiation safety, both past and present.

The best recent article for the general public that I could find was:

edition.cnn.com/2015/07/28/...

Note the comment in the link:

"However authors of the Interphone study stated that people with brain tumors might be more likely than healthy people to exaggerate their cell phone use."

I trust the epidemiological studies the most. But even they are often based on self-reporting, which is notoriously error prone.

Despite all this, if you fear that radiation would affect your brain, use earbuds with a built in microphone to minimize radiation to your head. That's what amateur radio operators advise.  

[Peggy4]

Thanks Neil. Good to read. I rely heavily on mine and it has worried me.

Peggy.

[alexmcg48]

I know they keep saying this, but my brother died after a second operation on a brain tumour & the one thing I can say about him is that for the 15 to 20 years before he died was he always had a mobile phone attached to his ear or at least it always seemed that way.  He was otherwise generally health, so when he got a tumour it was something of a shock & the only thing that might have contributed to it was his use of the mobile phone.

Whilst no one can be definitive on this I would say like so many things, moderation is the name of the game & maybe if you have to use a mobile a lot consider a hands free unit, so the phone isn't directly against the ear.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

Simon Chapman provides an update: Mobile phone health alarmists bereft of credible arguments: theconversation.com/mobile-...

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

In a reassuring update to this post, Per this Medpage Today Article:

medpagetoday.com/special-re...

To help sort out whether people may still need to be concerned about cell phones and the risk of cancer, MedPage Today caught up with several experts familiar with the research and the potential considerations going forward.

"It's becoming more of a quiet area," said Emanuela Taioli, MD, PhD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. "It was very intense and controversial 5 to 10 years ago."

One reason for the drop-off is that a number of the large studies that were being conducted were showing no real association between cell phone use and brain cancer, she added.

Notably, the Interphone Study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer was conducted in 13 countries and in 2011 did not find an increased risk of brain cancer from cell phone use.

Other large-scale studies have included a nationwide cohort study in Denmark that found that cell phones do not cause brain cancer, as well as the U.K. Million Women Study, which also concluded that cell phone use under usual conditions does not increase the incidence of brain tumors.

When those studies were launched, there was interest in conducting large-scale research that would cost many millions of dollars, because, even if the risk was small, "since we are all exposed, the public health relevance would be really high," Taioli said.

In those early days, there was a lot of concern, she noted. Phones would produce heat, and that was considered a potential sign of radiation entering the body.

Scientists worried what the overall effect would be down the line, she said. However, years later, the results from a number of studies, as well as the fact that incidence of brain tumors is decreasing in adults, may have contributed to waning interest.

Of note, research involving cell phone use is inherently hard to conduct.

So much of it relies on self-reporting, Taioli explained. It also involves trying to directly measure the use of the cell phone while it's against the head, she said. Other questions include whether the cell phone is pointed at another organ, how many hours a day the phone is directly against the head, and how long the phone has been used in that way.

Though Timothy Rebbeck, PhD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, concurred with certain limitations of large human studies, he said he believes experts in the field view the issue as largely settled.

"My take on it is, when you get to a certain level of human data ... the risk that might be conferred by cell phone use is so small," he noted.

:

Limitations similarly exist in the study of pesticides and chemical exposure -- it can be difficult to measure in people, he noted. However, with cell phone studies, enough of them have been well done, and "we can be pretty sure that there isn't anything that we're missing," he added.

"I think that we can make a policy or public health decision that cell phones don't cause cancer based on the summary of the evidence," Rebbeck said.

Moreover, messaging on the topic is crucial to help put it all in perspective, he continued. It's important to consider the things that really matter when it comes to cancer risk, such as smoking.

There are things people can do -- cancer screening, prevention, and vaccines -- that "really make a big difference," he said. "If you're worried about cancer, there are many other things that you can do to reduce your cancer risk that are real."

Given people can't be bothered to mask to protect against a ~0.3% of dying from COVID19, perhaps the above is to be expected.

As to the 5G COVID-19 scares, there are many variants , but the one about 5G chips in vaccines was debunked thus:

snopes.com/fact-check/covid...

Neil