9th December - Long or short-term mobile phone use is not
associated with increased risk of cancer, a major study has
found.
Mobile phone antennas emit electromagnetic fields that can penetrate
the human brain.
But a Danish team found no evidence that this was linked
to an increased risk of tumours in the head or neck as had
been feared.
The study, of more than 420,000 mobile phone users, appears
in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The researchers, from the Danish Institute of Cancer Epidemiology
in Copenhagen, looked at data on people who had been using mobile
phones from as far back as 1982.
More than 56,000 had been using a mobile phone for at least
10 years.
They found no evidence to suggest users had a higher risk
of tumours in the brain, eye, or salivary gland, or leukaemia.
Professor Tricia McKinney, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics,
University of Leeds, said: "The results of this Danish
cohort study are important as they have analysed data from
mobile phone company records and do not rely on users remembering
for up to 10 years in the past how often they used their phone.
"The large numbers of subscribers in the study mean
we can have some confidence in the results that have not linked
mobile phone use to a risk of any cancer, including brain
tumours."
Similar findings
The study follows a report published earlier this year by
the Institute of Cancer Research, which concluded that mobile
phone use was not associated with a greater risk of brain
cancer.
An independent group for the UK government, led by Sir William
Stewart, that looked into the safety of mobile phones in the
late 1990s also concluded mobile phones did not appear to
harm health.
However, expert advice is still to limit mobile phone use
among young people as a precautionary measure, as their head
and nervous systems may still be developing.
And the government currently advises mobile phone users to
keep their call times short.
There are more than one billion mobile phone users worldwide.
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