Cellular telephones and cancer risk

This nationwide Danish study is based on 420,000 persons starting to use a mobile phone between 1982 and 1995 who were followed up for cancer until the end of 2002. The cancer rates in this group were compared with the cancer rates observed among the rest of of the Danish population and, as they were similar, we concluded that there is no association between short-term or long-term use of mobile phones and the risk of cancer. This was particularly so for brain tumors, which were of major interest to us, as the mobile phones are held to the head and most energy emitted by the phone is absorbed in the lateral regions of the brain. The strengths of this study are its representativity, as the whole population was included, and the objective way of dividing Danes into early users of mobile phones and the rest, due to availability of the customer files of all Danish network operators. But the study has also limitations, since we had no possibility to separate occasional users from intense users of mobile phones, and since not every user of mobile phone is a subscriber or every subscriber a regular user. In addition, our study shares the limitation with all other studies up-to-date, that even most long-term mobile phone users rather started recently, about 10-15 years ago, so further follow up is required to investigate whether there may be risk occurring only after 20 or more years of use.  

Our study provides no evidence for a link between mobile phone use and cancer risk, based on a huge study population with a follow up of up to 21 years. However we strongly recommend further studies are needed to address a possible higher vulnerability to radio waves among children and potential risks among intense mobile phone users.

Bibliographic reference:

Schuz J et al.: "Cellular telephone use and cancer risk: update of a nationwide Danish cohort", J Natl Cancer Inst. 2006 Dec 6;98(23):1707-13

Joachim Schüz