Plausibility
The key fact to understand about cell phones is that they produce non-ionizing radiation. By definition, ionizing radiation is powerful enough to break chemical bonds. This is a health concern because breaking such bonds could cause mutations in DNA, and some of those mutations may turn a healthy cell into a cancerous cell. This is the primary reason that radiation causes cancer.
Non-ionizing radiation, however, is too low energy to directly break chemical bonds, therefore they cannot cause mutations or cancer. Physicists in particular like this physics argument and conclude that non-ionizing radiation is of no possible health risk.
Physicians, however, coming from a biological point of view sometimes argue that biology is complex and we cannot always anticipate all the possible indirect mechanisms of harm. Non-ionizing radiation, for example, may heat tissue causing some indirect harmful effect. Even this mechanism, however, is questionable as the local heating caused by cell phone use is probably insignificant compared to other daily factors.
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The Australian Study
The new study from Australia takes an ecological approach, which means they look at population data. They simply tracked the incidence of brain cancer by sex and age over the last 30 years, since the widespread introduction of cell phones. They then compared this to what we would expect to see if cell phones did indeed represent a risk factor for brain cancer.
They found that brain cancer incidence has been stable in women over the last 30 years, but slightly increased in men. They also found that the incidence has been stable in every age group, except for those over 70 where there was a small increase. However, this increase began in 1982, before cell phone use, but after the introduction of CT scan and MRI scan which allow for better diagnosis.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/still-no-association-of-cell-phones-and-brain-cancer/Underwhelming Cell Phone Rat Study
With that in mind, let’s take a look at this new rat study to see what it shows....
The first thing I note is that the study exposed rats to 9 hours a day of total radiofrequency (RF) radiation to the whole body in a reverberation chamber. This exposure started in utero. It’s a stretch to say that this mimics RF exposure from cell phone use. I guess if you spend half your waking life in a phone booth where your whole body is exposed to high levels of RF, you might be concerned.
The study also notes that rats of exposed mothers had decreased body weight. This to me sounds like a confounding factor – why was their body weight reduced, and what other negative effects could this have?
These two points aside, the results themselves are not very impressive. In male rats there was a statistically significant increased rate of brain gliomas and heart schwannomas. The authors claim there is a dose response effect, and maybe you can tease out a statistical effect, but looking at the numbers there does not appear to be a clear dose-response effect.
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Conclusion...
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/underwhelming-cell-phone-rat-study/
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