Article publication date
May 2025
ARPANSA review date
May 2025
Summary
This ecological study investigated trends in brain cancer incidence to evaluate the potential impact of increased mobile phone use in Spain since the early 2000s. It analysed brain cancer incidence data from 12 Spanish cancer registries, covering the period from 1985 to 2015. The analysis was stratified by age group, with separate evaluations for adults (aged 15 years and older) and children (aged 0 to 14 years). The dataset included 20,325 adult and 2,372 childhood brain cancer cases. Among adults, there was a slight annual increase in incidence of 1.7% until 1996, followed by a non-statistically significant decline of 0.1% per year up to 2015. In children, incidence rose by 7.6% annually until 1991, then declined by 1.0% per year through to 2015. The authors suggested that the increases observed in the 1980s and early 1990s could be attributed to improvements in diagnostic practices, particularly the adoption of advanced imaging techniques during that period. Overall, the study reported that the brain cancer incidence data in both adults and children does not support an association between mobile phone use and brain cancer.
Published in
Clinical and Translational Oncology
Link to study
Commentary by ARPANSA
The study reported no increase in the incidence of brain cancer in Spain during the 2000s, a period marked by rapid growth in mobile phone use in the country. While ecological studies are limited in their ability to establish causal relationships between risk factors and disease, they are valuable for quickly testing hypotheses using existing datasets.
One major limitation of this study is that it does not provide specific data on mobile phone subscription rates in Spain. Moreover, the mobile phone data referenced from the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation only dates back to the 2000s, limiting the ability to assess long-term trends. Despite this limitation,the conclusions are also consistent with similar studies that investigated trends in brain tumour incidence rates over time (Elwood et al, 2022; Deltour et al, 2022), including an Australia study (Karipidis et al., 2018) that have consistently found no increase in the rates of brain tumours related to an increase in mobile phone use. The conclusions are also in alignment with epidemiological evidence from a recent systematic review showing no association between radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) exposure from mobile phones and brain cancer (Karipidis et al., 2024).
The conclusions are in line with ARPANSA’s assessment, that at exposure levels below those prescribed in the Australian radiofrequency standard RPS-S1, there is no substantiated evidence of an association between RF-EMF and brain cancer or any other health effect.
