Mobile Phones Not Linked To Brain Cancer, Biggest Study To Date Finds (theguardian.com) 83
Mobile phones are not linked to brain and head cancers, a comprehensive review of the highest quality evidence available commissioned by the World Health Organization has found. From a report: Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded. The final analysis included 63 observational studies in humans published between 1994 and 2022, making it "the most comprehensive review to date," the review lead author, associate prof Ken Karipidis, said. "We concluded the evidence does not show a link between mobile phones and brain cancer or other head and neck cancers."
Published on Wednesday, the review focused on cancers of the central nervous system (including brain, meninges, pituitary gland and ear), salivary gland tumours and brain tumours. The review found no overall association between mobile phone use and cancer, no association with prolonged use (if people use their mobile phones for 10 years or more), and no association with the amount of mobile phone use (the number of calls made or the time spent on the phone).
Published on Wednesday, the review focused on cancers of the central nervous system (including brain, meninges, pituitary gland and ear), salivary gland tumours and brain tumours. The review found no overall association between mobile phone use and cancer, no association with prolonged use (if people use their mobile phones for 10 years or more), and no association with the amount of mobile phone use (the number of calls made or the time spent on the phone).
Not concerned. (Score:3)
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If they have not been able to prove a link after all these years, if there is any connection it has to be so tenuous as to be not worth worrying about.
Don't worry. RFK, Jr will be along any minute now and claim millions of people are developing cancer despite all these studies. He's studied it himself in between hacking off whale heads with a chain saw and dropping off dead bears in parks.
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If they have not been able to prove a link after all these years, if there is any connection it has to be so tenuous as to be not worth worrying about.
This meta-study is pretty much agreeing with the physicists; there really is no plausible mechanism for microwaves to cause cancer other than the simple heating, and the power levels of cell phones are orders of magnitude too low to produce noticeable heating.
Re:Not concerned. (Score:5, Interesting)
In America, truckers get skin cancer on their left arm.
In Australia, truckers get skin cancer on their right arm.
That was a very strong indication that the sun causes skin cancer.
Far more people hold their phone up to their right ear than their left ear.
So, if phones caused brain cancer, tumors would occur more often on the right side than on the left.
They don't.
Laterality of brain tumors [nih.gov]
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Far more people hold their phone up to their right ear than their left ear.
Now if we could find a way to make obliviots who put their phone on speaker and hold it horizontally below their chins get cancer, now we'd be doing something useful.
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Is this actually true? I've always held my phone (or UHF CB transceiver or whatever) in my left hand so I can write, use a computer mouse, shoot, etc. with my dominant hand while talking on the phone. I see a lot of people do the same thing.
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According to ChatGPT:
Right-handed people: About 68% of right-handed people use their right ear for their phone, while 25% use their left ear, and 7% have no preference.
Left-handed people: About 72% of left-handed people use their left ear for their phone, while 23% use their right ear, and 5% have no preference.
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I'm old enough to have used dial phones. Get off my lawn!
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Me too, been doing that since the days of landline (pre-mobile) days time. And now that you mention, everyone in my family uses left ear and so do most of the people that I see in my neighborhood and office. And we are all right handed, So I guess your logic of having the right hand free makes very good sense.
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US Naval Medical Research Institute (1972) published these symptoms of exposure to radiation (EMF-radiation):
- headaches
- dizziness
- nausea
- anxiety
- Difficulty concentrating
- memory loss
- insomnia
- fatigue
- muscle spams
- tingling
- altered reflexes
- muscle + joint pain
- leg/foot pain
eyes:
- pressure in/behind eyes
- deteriorating vision
-cataracts
heart:
- palpitations
- arrhythmia
- chest pain or pressure
- low/high blood pressure
respiratory:
- sinusitis
- bronchitis
- asthma
- pneumonia
skin:
- skin rash
- itching
- burn
Re: Not concerned. (Score:2)
Re: Not concerned. (Score:4, Informative)
Science isn't really about gaining certainty as much eliminating uncertainty by making predictions and invalidating those predictions via experiment. Everything we know about the RF radiation emitted by cell phones predicts a lack of carcinogenic effects from non-ionizing radiation and we have no experimental data that disproves that prediction.
These things are never properly studied because everyone somehow just "knows" that "non-ionizing radiation can't harm organisms". especially on slashdot."
if you want me to elaborate on how your assertion falls into the "not even wrong because that implies adjacency to the right/wrong dichotomy that you missed completely" category, do let me know. Not only are there numerous studies but the lack of health effects due to non-ionizing radiation is something that can be predicted by how said radiation behaves. That said prediction is consistent with reality doesn't "make RF work" but if we were wrong about that, we'd be wrong about some other adjacent concepts. As an example, radiotherapy would be ineffective because our predictions about non-ionizing radiation are correlated with predictions about ionizing radiation.
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And fer cryin' out loud, can we stop spending time and effort proving the moral equivalent of water is wet and fire is hot?
At this point trying to show a non-link between cell phones and cancer is as pointful as proving the Earth is round.
of course not ... (Score:2, Offtopic)
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At least there would be SOME kind of correlation between disease and cure in that case.
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Just to ordinary brain-rot (Score:2)
Which is usually not deadly, at least not directly.
however (Score:4, Insightful)
looking at the stuff provided to your phone from various social media sites will definitely destroy your brain.
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That destroys your *mind* not your brain.
Your statement is analagous to saying a computer virus destroys your computer's hard drive, when what it actually does is delete all your files.
Yes, I know, I'm being picky and technical and pedantic. This is slashdot. Get used to it.
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Clearly you have not read "Snow Crash."
Maybe there is.. (Score:2)
I think anyone who watches people who "enjoy" TikTok would disagree on the validity of this research.
They've been studying this a long time (Score:3, Interesting)
My dad got his Master's degree in electrical engineering in about 1974, around the time I was born.
His research involved the design of waveguides to aim microwave-band radiation at animal test subjects to study health effects. They didn't find any problems back then.
This kind of thing has been studied over and over again.
Still waiting (Score:2)
Cause and Effect (Score:4, Funny)
Having a brain tumor creates a desire to use mobile phones.
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Who holds a phone to their head anymore?
If anything, they should be checking for genital and thumb cancers.
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Be honest, you already have brain cancer, right?
Reverse correllation (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, I don't think you would. There is no correlation to reverse.
And what about other effects? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's always cancer in these studies. Are there no other conceivable harmful effects?
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It's always cancer in these studies. Are there no other conceivable harmful effects?
Such as? What other effect might there be?
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Such as addiction and depression.
https://therapybrands.com/blog... [therapybrands.com].
Re: And what about other effects? (Score:3)
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You cannot be serious. The current leading theory of what causes depression (the biogenic amine theory) is on the verge of being wholly disproven. There's no conceivable mechanism for non-ionizing radiation as a cause of depression or anxiety.
There has been some really promising research related to transcranial magnets and glutamate but that's not the same as the RF emitted by cell phones/cell infrastructure.
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If you look closer at the article I linked, it doesn't reference RF radiation at all. No, there is no link between RF radiation and depression. Mobile phone obsession *is* linked to depression.
Notice that neither the headline nor the summary mention RF radiation (though the article does).
Mobile Phones Not Linked To Brain Cancer, Biggest Study To Date Finds
If a link were found by the study, cancer (or any potential problem) could be caused by RF radiation, or by some other non-RF cause. The study didn't limit its research to a single vector.
Re:And what about other effects? (Score:4, Funny)
It's always cancer in these studies. Are there no other conceivable harmful effects?
Such as? What other effect might there be?
From some videos that I've seen, I'd say stupidity.
Re: And what about other effects? (Score:5, Informative)
It's always cancer in these studies. Are there no other conceivable harmful effects?
You generally can't just test for an arbitrary effect. For one you have to be able to measure it - and if you want to measure it in a large cohort over a significant span of time it likely has to be something that already has institutionalized screened for. You also can't just say "I'll look for any health effect" because if you are looking at a thousand different possible effects e.g. with 1% possibility of a chance positive result, now you start seeing "positives' just by the law of statistics. Good studies have defined endpoints.
This is also a systematic review which *requires* looking at a body of similar evidence - some topic that has recruited a lot of studies.
However, testing for cancer is effectively testing for many other effects as cancer is often a downstream result. E.g., cell damage, inflammation, poor cardiovascular health -- all things that are associated with developing cancer.
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... ... what other effects would there be? Are you saying non-ionizing RF radiation could cause arthritis or high blood pressure or fuck up your golgi apparatus or something?
Cancer is the only conceivable harmful effect because DNA damage is the only conceivable harmful effect of ionizing radiation.
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The number one cause of statistics is cancer.
The Sun transmits FAR MORE energy. (Score:2)
Re:The Sun transmits FAR MORE energy. (Score:5, Informative)
"The Sun transmits far more energy, of all wavelengths."
Since the Sun *does* cause cancer, that doesn't help your argument as much as you'd think.
(For the record, I don't believe in the cell phone/cancer connection either)
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Non ionizing radiation at high power levels such as from radar transmitters (orders of magnitude above mobile phone output) is associated with higher rates of cancers,
https://ehtrust.org/new-paper-... [ehtrust.org]
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because you say so and you have expertise, more than actual scientific study? That is an ignorant and unscientific point of view
So STOP holding the phone in front of your face (Score:2)
About a decade a go, I saw a friend holding his phone out in front of his face while talking. When he hung up, I asked why he held the phone like that. His answer? "Because of the risk of cancer caused by EMRs."...with an "s" at the end as if that's how you pluralized electromagnetic radiation. I told him that if he spent 10 minutes in sunlight, that was more radiations than he got using his phone for a year. Visible light alone is several orders of magnitude more energetic, and even that won't cause cancer
more than likely chemicals (Score:4, Informative)
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Or brain cancer has existed before any of these.
Physics (Score:2)
So they needed a study to prove that physics still applies to biology. This won't convince the conspiracists of course.
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There are conditions under which RF can cause damage to body, and so there are allowed limits of exposure. As example the SAR limit (and there are others) is lower in USA than in EU Studies of this article were done because of the possibility of mobile phone RF also having harmful effects.
You mock from an unscientific viewpoint.
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Physics says that microwaves are non-ionizing radiation, and in fact the only known health effects of microwave radiation are due to heating.
The body is remarkably good at compensating for heating (you can walk out into sunlight and not die in a minute at a kilowatt per square meter), but if the intensity is high enough, you can overwhelm the thermoregulation.
At power densities too low to overwhelm the body's thermoregulation, though-- and that includes cell phone power levels-- microwaves have no known hea
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maybe try looking at the decades of research the soviets did into "radio wave sickness" after the U.S. settled on this arbitrary and unproven non-ionizing can't harm anything policy.
> microwaves have no known health effects.
except for all the papers and books that report adverse health effects.
It's a prediction we can make from how RF radiation behaves. The same prediction informs our knowledge of the effects of ionizing radiation. If we were wrong about these things, there would be massive RF-related health epidemics. But because we're not wrong about these things, there aren't massive RF-related health epidemics, radiotherapy works like we think, and cell phones don't cause brain cancer because they can't.
Maybe try comprehending the vast gaps in your knowledge and flaws in your worldview that
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You're the one with gaps in knowledge. RF burns are a thing, heating of the eyes and testes because of no interior blood circulation is a thing sometimes leading to tumors in workers and reported by military of many countries.
Cut a hole in the door of you microwave oven, insert your hand or penis, and get back to us about your sudden discovery that non-ionizing radiation can indeed cause harm.
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Except heating of the eyeballs and testes, which heat more because of lack of interior blood supply, are a known cause of tumors in those that work with high power RF gear. Besides effects of x-rays from other components of those systems
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You are repeating what I said: the only known health effects of microwave radiation are due to heating.
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so why are idiots here saying non-ionizing radiation can't cause tumors including cancerous ones. That's the point, it can.
Not surprising (Score:2)
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Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
Most studies beam directly at a cellular system and observe an effect. I would postulate that most ar
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This is such a terrible point and no person with self-respect should make it. RF isn't a product marketed by a corporation - it's a concept. Cell phones not causing brain cancer has nothing to do with how any individual phone is made and everything to do with how electromagnetic radiation behaves and predictions that can be made from that behavior.
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Your turn.
No need for a study (Score:5, Funny)
Contrary Opinion (Score:2)
The "cell phones cook your brains" idea has been around since the very beginning. When cell phones first came out in 1983, I got one. A few months later, I was watching people wandering around, oblivious to street traffic in Cambridge, MA, yelling about nothing into their new toys. I turned to my companion and opined, "Look around you. These things DO cause brain damage. But it's not from RF. You don't even need to turn them on!"
41 years later, I stand by my words....
"Apple's" to oranges (Score:2)
That said, the power output on those analog phones, with their towers being farther away, were much higher then (3 watts for the transportables, but I can't recall the handhelds' output). Aren't today's phones capped at 0.25
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The different frequencies don't matter, they're still in the non-ionizing spectrum. They're all just radios and not much different than radio your average taxi-cab or OTR truck driver uses.
If non-ionizing radiation caused cancer, there would be an epidemic of cancers among radio operators and technicians.
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If non-ionizing radiation caused cancer, there would be an epidemic of cancers among radio operators and technicians.
Good point, but they, too, use remote antennas, at least they did in our shop. I always wondered whether physics' superposition principle can come into play here, where two non-ionizing energies can meet at a point in space, doubling their impact on DNA, etc.
Maybe not brain cancer (Score:2)
Maybe not brain cancer, but definitely "brain cancer".
Testicular cancer? (Score:2)
It seems like a lot of men's phones spend more time in their pants pockets than by their ears, so I would think looking at testicular cancer studies would also be useful.
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To be precise (Score:2)
No brain cancer was dectable in *Australian* brains.
Electric Razors (Score:1)