What a new study says about cellphone use and brain cancer

Cellphones do not cause brain cancer.
That’s the conclusion of an international team of researchers from 10 countries who did a comprehensive review of research in hopes of settling a debate that’s been ongoing since cellphones were invented.
The researchers, who were commissioned and partially funded by the World Health Organization, reviewed 28 years of research into whether the radio waves from cellphones increase risk of brain cancer or otherwise cause health issues. The answer, they said, is no.
Their findings, which included reviewing 63 studies from 22 countries between 1994 and 2022, were published in the journal Environment International.
Most of the studies examined the risk of brain tumors. Ten looked at whether fixed-site transmitters increased the risk of childhood leukemia or pediatric brain tumors. Some considered other health risks.
They said there was no increase in brain cancer over time related to cellphone use, either, even among those who’d had cellphones for more than a decade. Nor do cellphone towers create extra health concerns, the researchers concluded. And modern ones emit less radio frequency than older ones, as well.
The findings echo the conclusion of the National Cancer Institute, which published a fact sheet on cellphones and cancer. It noted that cellphone frequencies “fall in the nonionizing range of the spectrum, which is low frequency and low energy. The energy is too low to damage DNA.” Nor has the incidence of brain and central nervous system cancers changed since cellphone use increased, the institute reported.
The new study found that prolonged use of a cellphone or total time spent on the cellphone didn’t alter the findings.
The controversy over cancer risk from cellphones erupted in 1993, when a Florida man sued his wife’s cell phone carrier, NEC America, claiming that she died of brain cancer because of her phone’s radiation, according to Newatlas.com. He maintained in the lawsuit that her phone “was equipped with an antenna so positioned as to cause exposure to microwave radiation in an excessive and unsafe amount to the portion of the brain where the tumor was found.”
The lawsuit was dismissed in 1995, the article said, but the idea has persisted in some quarters.
As The Washington Post reported, WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had “classified radio wave exposure as a possible carcinogen to humans in 2011 — based on limited evidence from observational studies.” The article noted that “the WHO classification doesn’t mean that radio waves are a definite carcinogen — like the chemicals in cigarette smoke.”
More studies have been done that questioned that classification, which is why WHO commissioned the study.
Fear sometimes spreads simply because new technology is, well, new.
“Worries about the health effects of new technology are common and tend to increase when a new technology is adopted widely or adopted quickly,” Keith Petrie, a University of Auckland expert who was not involved in the review of the studies, told the Post.
“This was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic when people attacked radio cell towers believing a baseless theory that 5G towers spread the coronavirus,” he added.