Another Cell Phone-Cancer Study Emerges

oxide7 writes "Since the advent of cellular phones, researchers have pondered whether a connection exists between cell phone usage and brain cancer. New evidence always seems to emerge to support or refute such a link. On Wednesday, another study was added to the list. A European study involving nearly 1,000 participants found no link between cell phone use and brain tumors in children and adolescents. This marks the 3rd study this month and the 4th major one this year, all with different conclusions."

Comments

follow

[Anonymous Coward]

the money... who pays for the studies?

Re:follow

[shoehornjob]

Oh if I had mod points. You are so right and your formula can be applied to research done in various fields. I think Mythbusters presented the best research on the subject. They put Busters' head in a glass box with some alcohol soaked rags and a cell phone that was wired up to some kind of scientific instrument that measures radiation (yeah someone here will know wtf I'm talking about). They found that the radiation did spike a bit when making or recieving calls but it was within acceptable levels. And predictably it did not set Busters' head on fire. Damn.

Re:follow

[Joce640k]

FTA: "Since the advent of cellular phones, researchers have pondered whether a connection exists between cell phone usage"

Ummm, no they haven't. The underlying physics has been known for at least a hundred years and the appropriate experiments to confirm the theory were done to every thinking person's satisfaction long before cellphones even existed.

Anybody who thinks cell phones might cause cancer has no right to call themselves a "researcher". They're in it for the grant money, book sales and daytime TV appearances.

For the short-attention-spanners:
a) Cellphone radiation is made of exactly the same stuff as light.
b) Visible light is about a million times more energetic (i.e. dangerous) than cellphone radiation.
c) Visible light doesn't harm anybody (none of these 'researchers' seem worried about visible light, do they?)
d) Physics predicts that ultra violet light is where the cancer problem begins.
e) Simple observation confirms point (c) and (d)*

[*] Hence sun creams. Which are made by scientists.

Re:follow

[sjames]

While it does seem that cellphones don't cause cancer, a few of your points are weak enough that they should just be dropped.

a) so are X-rays

b) I'd rather be exposed to 800Watts of visible light than microwaves

Re:follow

[GrievousMistake]

Personally I doubt that cell phones have any notable effect on cancer rates, but dismissing it simply because the radiation is non-ionizing would be too hasty.

There are plenty of documented carcinogens besides ionizing radiation; irritants, burns, bacteria and various chemicals can all increase your risk of cancer.

The researchers are looking at cell phone use as a whole here. There are a couple of other effects that could plausibly have carcinogenic effects, though it is unlikely.
There's a list of potential issues at Wikipedia.
E.g., holding a cell phone close to your head while talking will cause slight but measurable heating of the brain.

Dismissing out of hand that any of these effects could cause cancer just because you think you understand the physics of radiation interacting with physical matter would be folly, comparable to dismissing asbestos as a carcinogen because you understand the effects of throwing rocks at a person.

Now, at this point there has been extensive studies on the matter, and I feel reasonably convinced that if there is indeed an effect, it is very slight. That was IMO the most likely result from the beginning, but considering the massive scale of worldwide mobile use, even a small probability of health issues is well worth researching.

Re:follow

[bertok]

slight but measurable heating of the brain.

A modern cellphone emits on the order of 1 W of radiated power. That would take an hour and a half to heat an adult brain up by 1 Kelvin, but our brains are liquid cooled, so that just can't happen.

If an increase in the temperature of the brain causes cancer, then people who work outdoors in tropical countries ought to get a very high rate of brain cancers. They don't. People who get fevers more often than average ought to get a high rate of brain cancers. They don't. The average person's body temperature changes by 0.5 degrees C due simply to natural daily rhythms! That's the same amount of 'heating' as 45 minutes of cell phone use, every day.

The cellphone-cancer link is pure pseudoscience. It's not enough to come up with some vague correlation if every other verified theory tells us that it just can't happen. A mechanism for the cause has to be proposed (a model), and it has to be shown to be valid rigorously, using double-blind studies and falsifiable experiments. Nobody has come even close, and nobody should expect to be taken seriously until they do.

I'm not so sure the conclusions are different

[Scareduck]

as they have been manipulated to sound different. The infamous WHO study was so mealy-mouthed as to be capable of saying almost anything the reader wanted.

Non-ionizing

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-ionizing. Quit wasting my time.

Re:Non-ionizing

[jank1887]

If only someone could go back in time and convince them to come up with another word to describe electromagnetic propagation. Think of all the time and money that could be saved. If it's not an ionized particle, IT'S DIFFERENT!

Re:Non-ionizing

[MonkeySpaceCapsule]

Actually, the fact that they are non-ionizing doesn't prevent them from harming DNA. Ionization loosely means that the power is sufficient to destroy a base pair in a DNA chain (via striping of an electron), if the full energy of the wave packet is absorbed. Ionizing radiation is guaranteed to hurt you if it is absorbed by your body (e.g., it will ionize something whether that is protein or DNA). My perception of why "non-ionizing" doesn't mean it is safe comes from a (tangential) education in terahertz radiation (e.g., microwaves). Simply put, just because the radiation may be low in power when averaged over time and space, the instantaneous energy density of the radiation might make it unsafe. DNA can be harmed through lots of different ways other than ionization (strand separation, mutagens, denaturing, etc.)

For an ocean analogy, just because the ocean has an RMS wave height of 5 feet doesn't mean that *all* the waves will be 5 ft tall. Instantaneous peaks (in space and time) will discharge sufficient energy (albeit non-ionizing) into DNA to cause the strands to separate (and be subject to other effects accordingly). For a gadget example, take the microwave. It isn't ionizing. It doesn't directly cause cancer, but if an organism is subjected to sufficient microwaves of power to denature proteins, the process will cause upticks in cellular metabolism to repair those proteins. I for one do believe that the uptick in metabolism does in fact lead to a higher incidence of cancer (though metabolic studies vs cancer rates are really not well documented in my book and mostly involve healthy people starving themselves).

I think the best take on cell phone radiation, for which sadly cannot attribute, was from a UK doc several years ago who was worried that the digitization of cell phone signals (vs analogue), while it would lead to a much lower RMS would also lead to bursts of *very* high instantaneous energy. This might denature proteins over time, like cooking an egg millimeter by random millimeter.

Forget studies on people with cell phones for the next decade or so. People are complicated and are difficult to pin down w.r.t. a cause of a disease. I think we probably need to spend more money on actual fundamental (microbial) research on non-ionizing radiations effect on cellular growth (such as http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/Cell-phone-radiations-affect-early/20355324.html). As for myself, right now I have no idea if they are safe, but I for one know that just being "non-ionizing" isn't enough.

Re:Non-ionizing

[repapetilto]

I think you're simplifying too much. Its better to quantify things. UV radiation is 1,000,000 times more energetic than radio. So the magic threshold you are talking about spans a factor of a million. Another way to put it is that the cutoff is not arbitrary at all. If you shine light that does not contain photons energetic enough to knock electrons away from their nuclei, it does not matter how long you do it for, or how bright the light is. You will never get ionization. This has been known for 100 years.

Can the exact energy required to ionize a molecule be affected by factors such as the solvent and interaction with other molecules around it?
Yes. This difference will not be by a factor of 1,000,000 though.

Could there be damage due to non-ionizing effects of the radiation?
Yes.

But is the damage due to non-ionizing radiation significantly more than the damage a cell causes to itself during day to day living?
Probably not. A normal cell repairs around 250,000 dna lesions per day (or 10,000 per hour, or 200 per minute). It is capable of repairing closer to 1,500 dna lesions per minute.

For reference, one hour of bright sun exposure causes about 80,000 dna lesions (1,300 per minute) and skin cells can take about 15 minutes of this before they start killing themselves off rather than trying to repair.
So if you look up how many dna lesions occur in RF treated cells now you will have something to compare to.

As to whether we should keep paying for these huge epidemiological studies without any proposed mechanism:

http://xkcd.org/882/
http://xkcd.com/925/

Re:Non-ionizing

[cababunga]

That would be a very inefficient brain. Here, I found couple pictures for you: http://www.strokecolorado.org/Graphics/brain-side.jpg http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/brain.gif

The conclusions are not that different.

[Kenja]

Remember, the study everyone was screaming about not too long ago put cell phones (and all other devices that emit radio waves of any sort) into the same carcinogen class as pickled cucumbers.

Re:The conclusions are not that different.

[ThatsMyNick]

So, pickled cucumbers can cause cancer?

Re:The conclusions are not that different.

[Joce640k]

Bananas are far more dangerous than cellphones, they emit ionizing radiation.

Re:The conclusions are not that different.

[bcrowell]

Sorry to tell you this, but the whole banana thing was a mistake. Your body maintains an equilibrium with respect to potassium. When you eat a banana, you quickly excrete just as much potassium as you ate. Negligible net increase in your radiation dose.

You don't know anything about radiation, do you?

[publiclurker]

Adding non-ionizing radiation sources together does not make it ionizing, nor does it increase the energy levels to where it can break chemical bonds.

Well, technically

[EdwinFreed]

Nonlinear effects are possible, like where two photons are absorbed then only one is emitted. So non-ionizing radiation could in theory interact in a way to produce ionizing energy. It's also possible that some structures are exquisitely sensitive to particular frequencies of radiation.

But a closer look shows just how unlikely such phenomena are. The probability of such interactions depends on there being sufficient energy density - you see them with megawatt lasers but not at the power levels where cell phones operate. As for some sensitive structure being present, if there was you'd think we would have found it by now.

Re:Sigh

[codegen]

What about non-ionizing UV light, then, which indeed causes DNA damage?

Actually it is in the UV band that radiation become ionizing. Near UVA(300-400nm) is non-ionizing. Middle and Far UVB/C (200-300nm) is ionizing. The latter(UVB/C) causes DNA damage directly. UVA can contribute to cancer, but it is indirect through interactions with radicals. Nobody has ever said that there are not chemical interactions that can be influenced by non-ionizing radiation (chlorophyll and blue/red light comes to mind). However, cell phones are in the microwave region. If you can show an organic molecule that reacts chemically at these frequencies, I suspect there is a Nobel Prize in it for you. So far all anyone has been able to show is heat.

Conclusions of yet another one

[houghi]

I have the conclusion of yet another study:
Studies cause cancer in rats.

Re:I'm still Calling BS

[leighklotz]

Imagine this statement: "Sunlight is not ionizing radiation therefore it is unthinkable that it can cause cancer."

You're massively confused. Sunlight *is* ionizing radiation, at least the UV portion. That's why sunlight causes cancer.

http://cancer.stanford.edu/skincancer/skin/causes/uvrad.html

Re:Children and adolescents?

[sjames]

This, like most cancer studies, is statistical. That is, the subjects self-select themselves into control or experimental group independent of the existence of the study.

The problem there is that self-selection introduces a lot of potential for confounding influences.

The huge advantage and why they're done in spite of such a serious shortcoming is that since the subjects self-select independently of the study's existence, the researcher bears no responsibility for the outcome.