REASSURING news for mobile phone owners: the largest study yet published
found no evidence that cellphones increase your risk of developing brain
tumours.
Peter Inskip at the National Cancer Institute near Washington DC and his
colleagues compared the mobile phone use of 782 patients with brain tumours with
that of 799 healthy volunteers. They found no significant link between mobile
use and the development of tumours, even among people who used mobiles for over
an hour a day, or who had used them regularly for five years or more (The
New England Journal of Medicine, vol 344, p 79).
However, because mobile phones haven鈥檛 been in common use for long, it is not
possible to draw any conclusions about the longer-term risks. The findings also
apply mainly to analogue handsets, which emit radiation in a different way to
newer digital phones.
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