No link between cell phone use and brain cancer, major report finds

News that should reassure people glued to their cell phones all day: a new international study finds no link between cell phone use and brain cancer.

Commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), the analysis was conducted by 11 experts from 10 countries who combed through decades of research—5,000 studies published between 1994 and 2022, to be exact. The final analysis was published in the journal International Environment.

What exactly were they looking for? They were trying to determine whether increased exposure to radio frequencies commonly used by wireless electronic devices, including cell phones, could increase the risk of being diagnosed with brain cancer.

What did they find? In the 63 studies they conducted, the risk of brain cancer was not increased, even with prolonged cell phone use (defined as 10 years or more), in people who spent a lot of time on their cell phones or in those who made a lot of calls. Nor did they find an increased risk of leukemia or brain cancer in children exposed to radio or television transmitters or cell phone towers.

“These results are very reassuring,” Ken Karipidis, the study’s lead author, told reporters, according to the Washington Post. “Even though cell phone use has “exploded,” there has been no increase in the incidence of brain cancer,” he noted.

Concerns about a potential link first arose in 2011 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s cancer agency, classified exposure to radio waves as a possible human carcinogen, the Post reported, but that was based on limited evidence from observational studies.

Karipidis explained that since then, “many more studies have been published” on radio waves and they have been “quite thorough,” prompting the WHO to commission the latest study.

Karipidis said the problem with some of the early research was that it relied on case-control studies that compared the responses of people with brain cancer to those without the disease, which can be “somewhat biased.”

Additionally, next-generation mobile phone networks, including 3G and 4G, actually produce “significantly lower” radiofrequency emissions than older networks, Mark Elwood, a study co-author and honorary professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told the Post.

“There are no major studies on 5G networks yet, but there are studies on radars, which have similar high frequencies; they do not show an increased risk,” he added.

Karipidis noted that having more cell towers actually reduces the amount of radiation emitted by cell phones because they don’t have to work as hard to get a signal.

One expert noted that new technologies that spread rapidly often raise fears of health problems.

“Concerns about the health effects of new technologies are common and tend to increase when a new technology is adopted widely or quickly,” Keith Petrie, an expert at the University of Auckland who was not involved in the study, told the Post.

“This happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people attacked cell towers believing a baseless theory that 5G towers spread the coronavirus.”

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