<My problem with many of these studies is the latency period. Let's face it; many tumors take 20 years to develop since the exposure to carcinogens. We won't find out anything really definitive until two decades after the analog phone craze took off around 1988-1990. Partly because brain tumors are rare, partly because they might take a very long time to develop.>
So we should expect the average age for those people in the study to be 50 years if we expect latency of a couple of decades.
If there were 5 people in that study whose tumours were due to cellphone radiation, they would be below the margin of error or statistical significance, whichever is the lower. And that's after only 5 years or so of cellphone use. Of the 782 people with a tumour, perhaps only 100 had used a cellphone to any significant extent.
If another 20 years went by, especially with continued cellphone use, the tumour development process could continue and we could end up with 50 of that many people with a cellphone-induced tumour. This study doesn't seem to exclude that.
I think the study was near useless. Sure, it shows that people are not dropping like flies, but that's not what many people think anyway. It's the small numbers we are looking for.
Here's the National Cancer Institute link:
rex.nci.nih.gov
Here's The New England Journal of Medicine link:
nejm.org
<Methods. We examined the use of cellular telephones in a case-control study of intracranial tumors of the nervous system conducted between 1994 and 1998. We enrolled 782 patients through hospitals in Phoenix, Arizona; Boston; and Pittsburgh; 489 had histologically confirmed glioma, 197 had meningioma, and 96 had acoustic neuroma. The 799 controls were patients admitted to the same hospitals as the patients with brain tumors for a variety of nonmalignant conditions.
Results. As compared with never, or very rarely, having used a cellular telephone, the relative risks associated with a cumulative use of a cellular telephone for more than 100 hours were 0.9 for glioma (95 percent confidence interval, 0.5 to 1.6), 0.7 for meningioma (95 percent confidence interval, 0.3 to 1.7), 1.4 for acoustic neuroma (95 percent confidence interval, 0.6 to 3.5), and 1.0 for all types of tumors combined (95 percent confidence interval, 0.6 to 1.5). There was no evidence that the risks were higher among persons who used cellular telephones for 60 or more minutes per day or regularly for five or more years. Tumors did not occur disproportionately often on the side of head on which the telephone was typically used.
Conclusions. These data do not support the hypothesis that the recent use of hand-held cellular telephones causes brain tumors, but they are not sufficient to evaluate the risks among long-term, heavy users and for potentially long induction periods. >
It would not find needles in the haystack and that's what we are looking for.
I think the easiest test is to count the tumours noting which half of the brain they are in, check which ear the person holds the phone to, [preferably by demonstration rather than a verbal test to avoid people confusing their left and right or being forgetful].
Since 70% [less than 80%, more than 60% - my count isn't accurate yet] of people hold the phone on the right side, we should see 70% of cellphone tumours on the right side. So with a large number of cases, we should see a right-side skew if cellphones are a cause [unless most people sleep on their left side and the extra blood pressure on that side balances the tumours out, or some other frustrating confounding variable does something similar, for example, driving on the right side of the road leaves the left side of the brain vulnerable to incoming high energy radiation, the right side being protected by the steel roof of the car.]
Mqurice |
