Brain cancer trends not linked to cell phones

Here's one way to figure out whether cell phones are causing brain tumors: Look at the incidence of brain cancer over a 30-year span that covers the period from before cell phones came into general use until today, when they're ubiquitous.

The results, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, involving an analysis of 60,000 brain cancer victims from Scandinavian countries, are encouraging.

While cell phone use jumped dramatically from 1974 to 2003, the period which the study covers, overall brain cancer trends in the population didn't follow suit. For some areas, brain cancer rates were stable or trended down. For some, the modest increase in cancer incidence had already been underway before cell phones came into use, indicating other causes are likely at fault.

In any event, no radical jump in brain tumors was detected over the years analyzed, something you'd expect if cell phones were really causing a lot of medical problems.

Of course, this doesn't mean that cell phones don't contribute to or encourage brain tumor growth in some fashion, but it's likely that if they do, the effect is "small to moderate." It's also possible that cell phones impact the growth of tumors, but only over a very long exposure time, more than five or ten years -- or that cell phones encourage the growth of different kinds of tumors or only in certain types of users (such as children or the elderly).

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