Excessive cell phone use enhances risk of brain tumor--study

Service providers and customers may call it a ring tone, but researchers have categorized it as a danger bell!

If findings of a new study are anything to go by, incessant use of the cell phone may result in brain tumor.
Previous studies have also established the link between excessive mobile phone use and brain tumor.

Previous studies have also established the link between excessive mobile phone use and brain tumor.
However the present 17 million pounds study establishes that the risk of contracting the disease is at least 25 percent higher than what the earlier studies showed.
The decade-long Interphone study, initiated by an UN World Health Organization agency, concluded that making calls for more than half an hour a day enhances users’ risk of developing brain cancer by as much as 40 percent.
Need to educate users
"What we have discovered indicates there is going to be one hell of a brain tumor pandemic unless people are warned and encouraged to change current cell phone use behaviours,” noted Lloyd Morgan, a member of America’s Environmental Health Trust lobby group.
Morgan highlighted that urgent steps, including education of the masses, must be initiated by the government immediately.
“Governments should not soft-peddle this critical public health issue but instead rapidly educate citizens on the risks,” he said.
“People should hear the message clearly that cell phones should be kept away from one’s head and body at all times,” opined Morgan.
Findings blown out of proportion
Cancer charities claim that the findings of the study, which was carried out in 13 countries across the world, were “overblown”.
Ed Yong, head of health information at Cancer Research UK, said, "The warnings of a ‘brain tumour pandemic’ are overblown.
“The majority of studies in people have found no link between mobile phones and cancer, national brain cancer rates have not increased in proportion to skyrocketing phone use and there are still no good consistent explanations for how mobile phones could cause cancer.”
He said that the findings of the present study, even after minor adjustments are incorporated, are still not statistically significant.
Researchers also admit that the results of the study are not irrefutable and that some element of statistical error or bias may have crept in.
Morgan feels that the main problem in the study was the “selection bias”. Many of the healthy participants chosen for assessment with tumor sufferers were apt to be mobile phone users themselves.
Other subjects, whose experience would have been helpful to the study, were either too ill to take part or did not take part in the study on their own.
“This means that any link between mobile phones and cancer that the conference presentation quotes could well be down to chance or anomalies in the data they collected,” Yong said.