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Dec. 8, 2009

The almost never ending debate about whether mobile handsets help promote brain cancer is still continuing...

But now the Danish Cancer Institute (DCI) late yesterday released what is perhaps one of the most extensive study to this day, and its findings are rather encouraging.

The 30-year study, which covers mobile phone use in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden from 1974 to 2003, found no direct link between mobile phones and brain cancer.

But the authors of the report were also quick to say that more research is still needed on the topic before any firm statement can be issued.

Four months ago, an international group of electromagnetic field activists offered criticism of an Interphone study on mobile handsets and cancer. The work was the result of a 13-country research effort funded in part by the European telecom industry.

However, and according to various groups, including the EMR Policy Institute and the Radiation Research Trust, the Interphone study was systemically skewed because it was commissioned on behalf of wireless handset manufacturers.

According to an abstract, the study showed a lack of a "trend change in brain cancer incidence from 1998 to 2003," when mobile phone use showed a marked increase in Scandinavia. That suggests that the induction period relating to mobile phone use linked to brain tumors exceeds 5 to ten years.

The report concludes that "the increased risk in this population is either too small to be observed, the increased risk is restricted to subgroups of brain tumors or mobile phone users, or there is no increased risk at all."

The activists also argued that the study ignored many types of brain tumors, and that it excluded people who had died or were too ill to be interviewed as a consequence of their brain tumors.

Activists also said that the study actually excluded children and young adults potentially at higher risk than mature segments of the population.

For its part, the CTIA maintains its position that mobile phone utilization does not cause brain cancer.

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Source: The Danish Cancer Institute.