It’s been a highly debated topic for quite some time now with no definite conclusions drawn either way as to whether or not mobile phones pose an increased risk of brain tumours.
Now Danish scientists have shed a little bit more light on the subject and have said that they found no substantial increase in the number of people who have developed brain tumours since the 1990s.
Remember it was around this point in time that the number of people using mobile phones started to rise, quite significantly, and has been increasing year after year ever since.
The research performed by the Danish Cancer Society was based on brain tumours diagnosed in nearly 60,000 people among 16 million adults aged 20 to 79 living in Denmark, Finland Norway and Sweden from 1974 until 2003.
If mobile phones were a potential cause of brain tumours then it would be reasonable to expect the numbers of brain tumour cases to start rising rapidly from the mid 1990s but that just wasn’t the case.
Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society who led the study said the lack of an increase in brain tumour cases from the 1990’s to 2003 could be either because it actually takes longer than that for the tumours to develop or because the number of tumours caused by mobile phones was too small to show up in the study.
Even though the results of this latest study are reassuring, particularly as it takes into consideration a time scale where mobile phone use increased dramatically and was centred on an area that has a relatively high number of mobile phone users (Finland is after all the home of Nokia), the researchers do say that more follow up studies are needed.
“Our results extend those of previous studies of time trends up to 1998 by adding five years of follow-up” said Deltour.
“Because of the high prevalence of mobile phone exposure in this population and worldwide, longer follow-up of time trends in brain tumour incidence is warranted.”
Dr Alison Ross, a senior science information officer for Cancer Research UK agrees with the Danish researchers.
“Overall, the scientific evidence tells us that using mobile phones for less than 10 years does not increase the risk of cancer and this large study supports that conclusion.
“However, brain tumours often take a very long time to develop so we will need to look for any future changes in incidence rates to see if mobile phones could pose any longer term risks” she said.
We’re not out of the woods yet then.
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