Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Tumors?

Do cellphones cause brain cancer?

Yeah, if you're on them a lot, yes, it can't be good for you. I did decide to stop, you know, putting the phone whilst I'm driving in my groin, inside my movie and over there, in case it's gonna cause testicular cancer. My doctor advised me on this.

Now, it doesn't seem to make sense that cell phones should cause cancer because the radiation they emit is non-ionizing, which means it doesn't have enough energy to rip electrons off atoms or molecules and destroy DNA. So how would cellphones cause this type of cancer?

In the black magic today, the radiation from cellphones is almost identical to the radiation inside a microwave. The wavelengths are almost the same, about 15 centimeters long, basically the same size as your phone. Oh, it was my microwaves; they like heat food up and like they fry living stuff, living organisms.

So maybe it would fry your brain, barbecuing O'Brien slowly. This led to various internet videos where cell phones were shown popping popcorn or cooking eggs. Now, that is obviously impossible because the amount of power in a microwave is over a thousand times the power of radiation of microwaves emitted from your cell phone.

Would you be concerned about living near a cell phone tower? Do you think that's worse than just...

Yeah, initially, right next to it. Yeah, but the truth is this: if you live in an area with better reception, that means your phone has to emit less microwaves in order to transmit to the tower. So you're actually exposed to lower levels of microwave radiation living near a tower than living far from it.

However, there have been some scientific studies that show very high levels of microwaves, like those from a mobile phone, can cause heat shock proteins to be released inside the body. And it's thought that that could be related to the onset of cancer. So perhaps there is a reason to study the biological effects of cellphones on people.

What would happen if a study came out saying that you were two or three times as likely to develop a brain tumor if you used a mobile phone regularly?

Would that change?

Absolutely, yes! Two to three times? It's just massive! Like, I know it's a slim 'I'd,' but still, the chances of life... you don't want that to happen to anyone, let alone yourself. So definitely not use it as much.

What if I told you that a study has come out that says over long periods of time, there's a three-fold increase in brain tumors? A recently published Swedish study found that cellphone users were 30% more likely to develop glioma, which is the most common form of malignant brain cancer.

And it gets worse: those people who had used a cell phone for over 25 years had a three-fold increase in this type of cancer. Due to studies like that one and expert opinion, the World Health Organization actually classified cell phone radiation as possibly carcinogenic to humans.

But now consider that brain cancers are exceedingly rare. In any given year, you have a three in 100,000 chance of developing glioma. Now, according to the Swedish study, long-term cellphone use can increase that risk up to nine in a hundred thousand. Still a very small risk, but a significant increase.

Now, given the scarcity of brain cancers, how can they really quantify this risk? The ideal way to do the experiment would be to perform a randomized control trial, which is where you get a group of people who don't use cell phones, randomly give half of them cell phones, and force the other half to live without. Then follow them for 15 to 20 years and see how many in each group developed glioma.

Oh, and you would need hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to take part because of just how rare brain tumors are. And immediately, you can spot the problem with this experimental design: virtually everyone already has a cell phone. I mean, there are more mobile devices than there are people on Earth. More people have access to a cell phone than to a working toilet.

So the next best way to do the experiment would be to perform a prospective observational study in which you gather a group of people and follow them over a period of decades, monitoring their cell phone use, and then you find out how many developed glioma and correlate that with their cell phone usage.

The problem is people who use their cell phones a lot may differ in other ways than just their cellphone use. Plus, there's the problem of scale. Even if you followed around 50,000 people for 10 years, you'd only expect to observe 20 gliomas, and that's not nearly enough to detect a difference between the groups.

So the third way to do the experiment is to perform a case-control study where you collect a group of people who have brain tumors — those are the cases — and you find a demographically very similar group who don't have brain tumors — those are the controls.

Then you ask them about their behaviors over the previous decade and see if they differ markedly between the groups. For example, did the brain tumor cases use their phones a lot more than the controls? The Swedish study was one of these large-scale case-control studies, but there is a question about whether this study was methodologically flawed.

In hindsight, if you get a brain tumor, you might remember using your phone more than you did, and if you don't have a brain tumor, you might remember using it less. Now, there have been a few prospective studies completed, including one in Denmark using almost the entire Danish population and records from their cell phone companies, and they found no link between cell phone usage and incidence of brain cancer.

Another prospective study using almost 1 million women in the UK again found no link.

So what are we supposed to believe then? What are we supposed to believe? This is where I think we really need to figure out the right methodology exactly to look at it.

And here's a thing, right? Over the last 15 to 20 years, almost everyone has used mobile phones. Mobile phone use has gone way up. Everyone's going, so you can look at the actual brain cancer rates on the overall population.

Yeah, and if there is a link, you would expect that to be going up, is it? It is not! Okay, if the results of the Swedish study were correct, then the rates of glioma would be more than 40 percent higher than they are. So it is extremely unlikely that cellphones actually cause brain cancer.

And if they do, either the effects take decades to show, or the increase in risk is very, very small.

Hello!

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