Authored By:
Pettersson D, Bottai M, Mathiesen T, Prochazka M, Feychting MThis study aimed at validating the mobile phone use history reported by study participants in a large Swedish population-based case-control study that investigated the association between mobile phone use and acoustic neuroma risk. The self-reported start year of mobile phone use was validated from a total of 96 out of 326 cases and 111 out of 505 controls, using the network operator data. About 60% of subjects were able to correctly identify the start year of mobile phone use. The authors concluded that recall bias could not be excluded in this study.
Published In:
J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 2015; 25 (1): 72 - 79One of the biggest problems with epidemiological studies investigating the relationship between mobile phone use and tumour risk is the validity of data on self-reported mobile phone use obtained from the study participants. Recall bias is often the cause and as cases over-report and controls under-report their mobile phone use, bias in results may occur and interpretation of results becomes difficult. The INTERPHONE project, which is a large case-control study looking into association between mobile phone use and cancer risks from 13 different countries including Australia, also cites that recall bias is one of the limitations of the study that prevent conclusions of causality being drawn. Interestingly, in this study there was no significant difference between cases and controls in estimating start year.
