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In Brain Tumors by comparing phones
Scientific evidence increasingly dismissed the possibility of a link between cell phone use and brain tumor development, despite recent statements about the carcinogenic potential of these devices, a new study.
A major review of research previously published by a committee of experts from UK, USA and Sweden concluded that there is no convincing evidence to discuss any connection between mobile phones and cancer.
The experts also found that there would be no established biological mechanisms through which the radio signals from mobile phones could generate tumors.
“Although some uncertainties remain, the trend in the accumulated evidence is growing against the hypothesis that mobile phone use causes brain tumors in adults,” they wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The latest report comes two months after the International Agency for Research on Cancer World Health Organization (IARC for its acronym in English) decided that the use of cell phones should be classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”.
Anthony Swerdlow of the Institute of Cancer Research UK, who led the new review, said both positions are not necessarily contradictory, since the IARC needed to put the phones in a category of pre-defined risk.
“We’re trying to say we believe that the relationship exists. IARC experts attempted to classify risk according to a predetermined classification system,” said Swerdlow. Other things considered by the IARC as possibly carcinogenic products are as diverse as lead, pickled vegetables and coffee.
The use of cell phones has increased dramatically since the early 1980′s. There are currently about 5,000 million active devices and the controversy over its possible relationship with the main types of brain tumors, gloom and meningioma had never gone that far.
The largest study to date, and published last year, looked at nearly 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years. Swerdlow and colleagues analyzed the results in detail but found that would provide a clear answer, in addition to finding several methodological problems in this study because it was based on interviews and requests for participants to remember the use of phones several years ago.
Similarly, other studies from several countries found no evidence of increased brain tumors 20 years after the introduction of mobile phones and 10 years after it expanded its use, they added.
Difficult to prove
in science, proving the absence of a link is always more complex than finding an association and Swerdlow noted that in the coming years should be clearer whether there is a link between cell phones and cancer.
“This is really a difficult issue to investigate,” said David Spiegel halter, a professor at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study.
“But even given the limitations of the evidence, this report is clear on any risk appears to be so small that it is very difficult to detect, even in the masses of people now use mobile phones,” he said.
Swerdlow is chairman of the Standing Committee on Epidemiology of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation.
The commission is the international organization recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), which prepares guidelines on exposure limits to non-ionizing radiation.