Further evidence that using mobile phones does not increase the incidence of brain cancer

Authored By:

This Canadian study used data from the Canadian Cancer Registry to compare the recorded incidence rates of glioma and the prevalence of mobile phone use (measured by the annual number of mobile phone subscriptions) between 1992 and 2015. The glioma incidence trends were also compared to the risk estimates in three other studies reporting an association between mobile phone use and glioma;  a recent pooled analysis of Swedish case-control studies, the INTERPHONE study, and an analysis of the data collected from the Canadian component of the INTERPHONE study. The authors reported that when comparing the actual number of cases of glioma diagnosed in Canada in 2015 to the risk estimates, these studies overestimated the observed number of gliomas diagnosed by 50%, 86%, and 63%, respectively. Further, the authors also reported that despite the enormous growth in the ownership and use of mobile phones from the early 1980s up to 2015, the observed cases of glioma remained stable over the study period, indicating that there is unlikely to be a causal link between mobile phone use and glioma.

Cell phone use and the risk of glioma: are case-control study findings consistent with Canadian time trends in cancer incidence?

Published In:

The results of this study are consistent with a similar study conducted by ARPANSA (Karipidis et al) that reported stable incidence rates of glioma and other types of brain cancer in Australia over the period from 1982 to 2013 despite the increased prevalence of mobile phone use during this time. Both studies used mobile phone subscription data to estimate mobile phone use in the population and this may not be a true indicator of actual mobile phone use. Nevertheless, it is inherently clear that the use of mobile phones in society has increased rapidly during the timeframe accounted for in these studies. This, combined with the stability in brain cancer trends, indicates that case-control studies reporting associations with mobile phone use and brain cancer may be affected by biases in exposure assessment, especially where mobile phone use data is self-reported.

This study adds further evidence that there are no substantiated adverse health effects from exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic energy from mobile phones and other wireless devices where the emissions are below the public exposure limits set in the ARPANSA Standard and the International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection’s radiofrequency guidelines.