The incidence of brain cancer has not risen in tandem with the rising popularity of cell phones since the mid-1990s, a landmark review has found.
Mobile phone use does not seem to increase the risk of brain cancer, according to a sweeping review commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Cell phones emit non-ionising radiation at frequency and energy levels that are low enough not to damage DNA, unlike ionising radiation found in medical x-rays and the Sun.
And despite the surge in popularity of cell phones and other wireless technology that uses similar radio frequencies – including radio, TV, and baby monitors – there has not been a similar rise in the incidence of three types of brain cancer, leukemias, or cancers of the pituitary or salivary glands, according to the meta-analysis, which included 63 studies published over two decades and was published in the journal Environmental International.
“For the main issue, mobile phones and brain cancers, we found no increased risk, even with 10+ years exposure and the maximum categories of call time or number of calls,” Mark Elwood, a study co-author and an honorary professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said in a statement.
The new findings come on the heels of another major study that found people who use their cell phones often are not at higher risk of brain cancer compared with people who use them infrequently.
That analysis followed about 250,000 people for a median of seven years in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland.
Taken together, the results lend scientific heft to the notion that, for the vast majority of people, phones do not contribute to brain cancer risks.
“This really consolidates what we’ve been seeing,” Aslak Harbo Poulsen, a senior researcher at the Danish Cancer Institute, told Euronews Health.
No correlation between cell phones and tumours
His research in Denmark, which included about 358,000 mobile phone subscribers, was included in the meta-analysis, but he was not involved with the new study.
“There does not appear to be a strong correlation between mobile phone use and risk of these tumours in the general population,” he said.
The main open question, Harbo Poulsen said, is whether there might be an impact on a fraction of people, for example very heavy or long-term cell phone users – but this would still be “extremely rare”.
The WHO warned in 2011 that mobile phones were “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” and its research arm has since been conducting large-scale studies on the potential links.
Harbo Poulsen said that in research on the potential health risks tied to phones, it’s usually unclear whether any associations are due to radiation, light exposure at nighttime, or another cause.
Notably, the new study’s cutoff point was in 2022, when 5G networks – which operate at a higher frequency spectrum than older generations – were still relatively new.
However, they are still considered non-ionising, and study authors said people shouldn’t be worried.
“There are no major studies yet of 5G networks, but there are studies of radar, which has similar high frequencies; these do not show an increased risk,” Elwood said.