JOIN USMobile phones may up brain cancer risk by five fold
The new research comes weeks after the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organisation, stated that radiation from handsets was “possibly carcinogenic”, though it stopped short of declaring there was a clear link.
Campaigners, meanwhile, said the research was further evidence of the need to educate children of the potential dangers of mobile phone usage, the Daily Telegraph reported. For the study, the researchers from the University Hospital of Orebro and Umea University examined the mobile and cordless phone use of more than 1,200 Swedes, who were diagnosed with malignant brain cancer between 1997 and 2003.
Of those, the 905 who were still alive were interviewed about their phone usage.
For the remaining 346, who had died, researchers asked their relatives about their loved-ones’ telephone habits.
They compared this to phone use information on almost 2,500 “controls” who were either living and had no brain cancer, or had died of other causes. After matching each “case” and each “control” for age, sex and social class, the team concluded that using both mobiles and cordless phones led to “an increased risk for malignant brain tumours”.
People who started using mobiles as teenagers, and have done so for at least 10 years, were 4.9 times more likely to develop astrocytoma . Worringly, the researchers said the comparative figure for cordless home phones — which are very similar to mobiles in terms of radiation emission - was almost as high, at 3.9.