The incidence of brain cancer has not increased in parallel with the growing popularity of mobile phones since the mid-1990s, according to a new study.
Can cell phones cause cancer? It is one of the great questions that have given rise to many conspiracy theories and fake news for decades. But the use of mobile phone does not increase the risk of brain canceras demonstrated by a large study commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Mobile phones emit non-ionizing radiation with sufficiently low frequency and energy levels. so as not to damage the DNAunlike the ionizing radiation present in medical X-rays and the Sun.
And despite the rise in popularity of cell phones and other wireless technologies that use similar radio frequencies (such as radio, television, and baby monitors), there has not been a similar increase in the incidence of three types of brain cancerleukemias or cancers of the pituitary or salivary glands, according to the meta-analysis, which included 63 studies published over two decades and was published in the journal ‘Environmental International’.
“For the main topic, cell phones and brain cancers, we found no increased risk, not even with more than 10 years of exposure and the maximum categories of call time or number of calls,” Mark Elwood, co-author of the study and honorary professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said in a statement.
The new conclusions come shortly after another important study according to which people who use mobile phones frequently are not at increased risk of brain cancer than those who do it infrequently.
That analysis followed about 250,000 people for an average of seven years in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland. Taken together, the results give scientific weight to the idea that, for the vast majority of people, phones do not contribute to cancer risk cerebral.
“This really consolidates what we have been seeing“Aslak Harbo Poulsen, principal investigator at the Danish Cancer Institute, told Euronews Health.
There is no correlation between mobile phones and tumors
His research in Denmark, involving some 358,000 mobile subscribers, was included in the meta-analysis, but he was not involved in the new study. “There does not appear to be a strong correlation between mobile phone use and the risk of suffer from these tumors in the general population,” he said.
The main open question, according to Harbo Poulsen, is whether there could be an impact on a fraction of people, for example very intensive or long-term users of mobile phonesbut this would still be “extremely rare.”
The WHO warned in 2011 that mobile phones They were “possibly carcinogenic to humans”and its research arm has since been conducting large-scale studies into possible links.
Harbo Poulsen said that in investigations into the Possible health risks related to phonesIt is generally unclear whether the associations are due to radiation, light exposure at night, or another cause.
It should be noted that the cut-off point of the new study was in 2022, when 5G networks (which operate in a higher frequency spectrum than previous generations) They were still relatively new..
However, they are still considered non-ionizing, and the study authors said that people shouldn’t worry. “There are no major studies yet on 5G networks, but there are on radar, which has similar high frequencies; these do not show an increased risk,” Elwood said.
