A recent study about the relation between cellphone use and cancer risk is being reported with headlines like: Study finds no mobile phone link to cancer, Cellphones ‘don’t cause cancer’, No Link Between Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumors, Study. Great, right? Not so fast. Reading the small print (i.e. the latter paragraphs in most of the stories about the study), you find:
Lead by Dr. Christoffer Johansen at the Danish Cancer Registry, the pan-European study questioned 427 people with brain tumors and 822 people without brain tumors about the frequency they had been using cell phones. Phone bills were used to check the validity of the responses.
Finding patients with brain tumors were not using their phones for longer durations or frequency than users without tumors, the two are unlikely linked. But Dr. Johansen said, “We won’t be able to make any firm conclusions until we can confirm these results with studies with more long-term and heavy cell phone users.”
“In our study, few people reported regular cell phone use for 10 years or more. So we still do not know the full story.”
rant
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