Mobile phones DO fry your brains
Study finds cancer link
By INQUIRER newsdesk: Thursday 25 January 2007, 15:18
MOBILE PHONES can frazzle your brains, new research suggests.
The mobile phone industry maintains the line that there is no proven link between mobile phone use and folk going bonkers or having bits of them go wrong. No doubt they will be pooh-poohing research to be published later this year in the International Journal of Cancer.
But, according to leaks of the study, people who regularly used mobiles for 10 years and more were up to 40 per cent more likely to develop nervous system tumours - gliomas - on the side of their head where they hold their phones.
This is the second major study to suggest a link between long-term yakking on the wireless airwaves and growing odd lumps on your head.
A recent Finnish study by the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found that people who had used a mobile for 10 years or more were 39 per cent more likely to sprout a glioma on the side of their head they held their phone.
A spokesman for the Mobile Operators Association told the Daily Telegraph, "The overall results of this study do not show increased brain tumour risk in relation to mobile phone use.
"The findings related to tumour location are difficult to interpret, he claimed."
Fancy a fag, anyone?
Mobile phones cause cancer...or notOne result of 'borderline statistical significance'
By Bill Ray
Published Thursday 25th January 2007 15:45 GMT
People using a mobile phone for more than 10 years have a 40 per cent increased chance of developing glioma (a kind of brain tumour), according to research reported in the Telegraph.
However, the study referenced would seem less clear-cut, and certainly the authors draw less compelling conclusions.
The study involved questioning 4,822 people, of whom 1,521 were glioma patients. The idea was to establish which hand the patients used to hold a phone, and thus which side of the head the phone was near. This data is then compared with the side of the head on which the glioma appeared.
Overall, the study found no evidence of mobile phone use influencing the incidence of glimoa, but if only those who had used a phone for more than 10 years are included (all 222 of them), there is a match at a level the report's authors describe as "of borderline statistical significance".
This could be down to the inaccurate memories of the subjects, statistical coincidence or, possibly, phones effecting glimoa. The report calls for more research.