Mobile phones might not fry your brain

Researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Universities of Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester said they found no link between long-term mobile phone use and glioma.

The study, published by the British Medical Journal in a pdf here, compared the mobile phone use of 966 people with glioma with that of a control group of 1,716 volunteers.

Based on data collected in interviews concerning mobile phone use over a ten-year period, the researchers concluded that those who regularly used mobile phones were not at a greater risk of developing glioma.

But there was some conjecture over whether using a mobile on one side of the head or the other could have had an influence on the development of tumours. The researchers suggested that glioma sufferers may have imagined a link between the cancer and using a mobile.

The study concluded: "Use of a mobile phone, either in the short or medium term, is not associated with an increased risk of glioma. This is consistent with most but not all published studies. The complementary positive and negative risks associated with ipsilateral and contralateral use of the phone in relation to the side of the tumour might be due to recall bias."

The risk of mobile phone use over the longer term could not yet be evaluated due to a lack of useful data. µ