Biggest Study On Cellphone Health Effects Launched in Europe

An anonymous reader writes "The biggest study to date into the effects of cellphone usage on long-term health was launched today, aiming to track at least a quarter of a million of people in five European countries for up to 30 years. The Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (COSMOS) differs from previous attempts to examine links between mobile phone use and diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders in that it will follow users' behaviour in real time. Most other large-scale studies have centred around asking people already suffering from cancer or other diseases about their previous cellphone use. Researchers said long-term monitoring will provide more time for diseases to develop, since many cancers take 10 or 15 years for symptoms to appear."

Comments

permanent mouth movement

[CdXiminez]

I wonder what mental and dental health effects they find now that most people's mouths never stop moving anymore.

More info on study

[thijsh]

There is some more info here: http://www.mthr.org.uk/research_projects/COSMOS.htm

Apparently the project is in the UK, Scandinavia and The Netherlands, let's see if I can participate...

No details on how the study is performed but I guess they will just try to gather data for statistical analysis. I hope they will make a difference between calling for hours daily (holding at your ear) and using mobile Internet over 3G for hours daily (on your lap / in hand)... Most studies until now just looked at the length of use and calculate the energy absorbed by the body (i.e. a sack of water), and I guess there aren't really a lot of interesting things to learn from that...

Cause or effect?

[Joce640k]

So...um, if they find brain cancer in the sector of the population who can't ever seem to put their phones down, will that be diagnosed as a cause or an effect?

Re:Cause or effect?

[jamesh]

This is the real problem. The believers will go right on believing no matter what the conclusion is.

Truer words were never spoken. The results of the study can never be 'mobile phones cause cancer'. If there is any correlation it will be something like 'heavy use of a mobile phone increases your chance of brain cancer by x%' where x is likely to be quite small or we'd have noticed it by now, and certainly small enough that it won't have much meaning to anyone and they'll keep on doing the same thing as they always have.

What we know right now is that talking on the phone while driving reduces your concentration by some amount (depending on a whole load of factors including the person) and increases your chances of an accident by some amount. It doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it though. Neither does the threat of punishment. The numbers are small enough that people can rationalise them down to zero through the various cognitive biases that inhabit the human mind. In particular "it will never happen to me".

(My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.)

Re:Cause or effect?

[Thanshin]

(My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.)

My bet is that there will be more deaths by phone-attracted lightning than by phone radiation.

Re:Cause or effect?

[TheLink]

> My bet is that phone related distractions cause more accidents and deaths than phone radiation will ever cause.

If that is true heavy cellphone use could actually help reduce your chances of getting cancer ;).

So even if cancer risks actually increase for heavy users who never drive while using them (who are probably a small minority), the results of the study might be "no increase in cancer" to average person :).

Re:What, now?

[ZombieWomble]

With regards to this data being relevant to cancers from "yesteryear" - to be blunt, they don't care. The purpose of these studies is to determine whether current mobile phone usage poses a risk to the population. If someone developed a cancer from using a phone which was made to poorer standards a decade ago, that's a shame, but there is no particular reason you should expect this research to be relevant to them, and moreover what good would it do? Unless they were anxious to try and throw around lawsuits, there's no benefit to working out the risk factor they were exposed to.

And as for why this study has taken so long to do - you don't launch a study costing many millions of pounds and spanning decades as a first step in research (particularly in a field with relatively sketchy underlying hypotheses). You start with smaller, retrospective, studies which allow for large effects to be readily detected, at a fraction of the cost. The problem with mobile phones is that there is no evidence for the type of large-scale, acute effect which can be readily quantified by such small projects, so a larger project (like this one) is required to look for smaller-scale effects (which may still be significant on the level of the population).

And the problem with a big project is actually managing to get enough stats for sufficient predictive power - in the early days of mobile phone usage there simply weren't enough people regularly using mobile phones to make meaningful predictions about the effects on the level of a population. Indeed, it notes that even five years ago a study of this kind had to be halted because of a lack of participation.

Berating scientists for wanting to perform good-quality studies is not very productive. The demand for scientists to produce dramatic information very quickly tends to lead to lead to misleading results being presented, and statements of that kind (see: foods which cure/cause cancer every other week) is one of the reasons many people are losing faith in science.

Control group?

[igaborf]

Yeah, but where are they going to find a control group of people who don't use a cellphone?

</kidding>

Re:Results

[SharpFang]

And the cave people will be called Morlocks and the wave-people will be called Eloi...

new category of story

[argStyopa]

+1, we're going to keep studying this until it agrees with our preconceived ideas.

Re:What, now?

[blackfrancis75]

.. many people are losing faith in science.

IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.

Non-Ionizing radiation

[SciBrad]

Cannot break apart molecules. How exactly would an electromagnetic wave that can't ionize anything cause cancer? Usually to cause a cancer from radiation you need to cause some sort of ionization damage as far as I'm aware. Physics quite strongly says that these microwaves do not have the proper energy to do this, even if you have a lot of them. People can go on about 'heating effects' which is a common response I see to the non-ionizing radiation bit, but if that were the case, prolonged exposure to heat packs should also cause cancer. Luckily the body is quite good at dissipating heat. Based on physics there is no plausible mechanism for a cell phone to cause a cancer. The radiation just isn't energetic enough to break any bonds, and that is what counts.

There is faith in science (just very little)

[jonaskoelker]

IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.

There's a scientific meta-claim that submitting theories to trial by experiment (and discarding the theories which disagree with the world) is likely to produce good theories about how the world works.

How would you verify this? Experimentally? Why would you believe that experimenting is a good way to learn the truth?

Yes, in the end I'm asking "you believe that what you see (perceive) is a reasonably accurate reflecting of what the world really is like; why?" But my answer is still the same: there is an element of faith in science.

That said, I want that kept small, carefully watched and well understood.