The largest study of its kind found no link between long-term use of cellphones and increased risk of brain tumours, the British Medical Journal reported on Friday. Danish researchers found no evidence of enhanced risk among more than 350,000 cellphone subscribers whose health was monitored over 18 years.
Earlier research on the possible link between cellphone use and cancerous tumours has been inconclusive, partly due to lack of long-term data. In June, the World Health Organis-ation’s International Age-ncy for Research on Canc-er classified the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phones as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
The study follows up an earlier investigation that compared the cancer risk faced by all mobile phone subscribers in Denmark — some 420,000 people — with the rest of the adult population. Patrizia Frei, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Danish Cancer Society, and colleagues examined health records from 1990 to 2007 for 358,403 cell phone subscribers. Overall, 10,729 tumours of the central nervous system were diagnosed. But among people with the longest mobile phone use — 13 years or more — cancer rates were nearly the same as for non-subscribers. The findings, however, could not rule out the possibility of a “small to moderate increase in risk” for very heavy users, or people who have used cellphones for over 15 years.