Landmark study set to show potential dangers of heavy mobile phone use - Telegraph

Landmark study set to show potential dangers of heavy mobile phone use - Telegraph



Landmark study set to show potential dangers of heavy mobile phone use
Prolonged mobile phone use could be linked to a type of cancer, the largest investigation of its kind will show next week.

A landmark study will include some evidence that those who regularly hold long conversations on handsets are at increased risk of developing potentially fatal brain tumours.

Its findings may lead the Government to update its health advice on the safety of mobile phones, which has remained unchanged for four years despite increased usage in Britain particularly among children.

But the scientists in 13 countries who contributed to the decade-long, £15 million Interphone project are likely to face criticism that despite the time and expense involved in their work, the data obtained are inconclusive and susceptible to error.

The study was started by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the UN’s World Health Organisation, in 1998 to investigate whether exposure to mobile phones is linked to the development of three types of brain tumour.

It was known that radiofrequency radiation emitted by mobiles is absorbed by the body, much of it by the head when the handset is held to the ear. But research into whether frequent mobile phone use damages health had proved inconclusive, mainly because of the short time since the technology became widely used.

Between 2000 and 2004, researchers therefore interviewed tumour sufferers and those in good health – 12,800 in total - to see if their mobile phone use differed.

Some of the studies that have been published individually showed increased risk of glioma - the most common type of brain tumour - among those who talked on a mobile for about 30 minutes a day for 10 years. Many who developed the tumours saw them grow on the same side of the head as they held their handsets.

A summary of the results stated: “Pooling of data from Nordic countries and part of the UK yielded a significantly increased risk of glioma related to use of mobile phones for a period of 10 years or more on the side of the head where the tumour developed.”

Interphone will hold back from asserting that mobile phones cause cancer as the evidence is not conclusive and also because of questions over its reliability.

Its definition of “mobile phone user” included people who only made one call a week, and many fear that accurate results cannot be obtained by asking people to recall how often they used their mobile phones, and to which ear they held them, several years earlier.

Some of the results for short-term use appeared to show that mobile phones protect against cancer, suggesting the study design had serious flaws.

It has been claimed that the positive results could be explained by “recall bias” as people who have developed brain tumours are likely to believe they must have been caused by something, such as their previous use of mobile phones.

The final results paper of the study, one quarter of which was funded by the mobile phone industry, has been delayed for four years while the authors argued over how to present the final conclusions but will be published in a scientific journal next week.

It will call for more research, particularly among the young, and also warn that more frequent use among the world’s 4billion mobile phone owners means that exposure to radiation is now far higher than the data used in Interphone.

Despite its limitations, Interphone remains the largest study carried out into the safety of mobile phones so health ministries worldwide and the billion-pound telecommunications industry are likely to rely heavily on its findings.

The Department of Health has not updated its guidance for more than four years and only suggests that children should be “discouraged” from making “non-essential” calls while adults should “keep calls short”.

However other countries have urged users to buy hands-free sets or send texts rather than making calls, or to ban advertising of phones aimed at children.