Monday May 19, 2014 (foodconsumer.org) -- A French case-control study published on May 9, 2014 in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine suggests that using mobile phones can increase risk of brain cancer.

Among previous studies, short term studies tended to yield a negative association between use of mobile phones and risk of brain cancer while long term studies tended to reveal a positive association between using mobile phones and brain cancer risk, which indicates that exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields from mobile phones may be involved in the aetiology of some brain tumors, or specifically, primary central nervous system tumors in adults.

Dr Gaëlle Coureau at Université Bordeaux Segalen, ISPED, Equipe Santé Travail Environnement in Cedex, France  and colleagues conducted the study and found heavy mobile phone users who used a total of more than 896 hours were 189% and 157% more likely than those who did not use mobile phones to develop gliomas and meningiomas.

The study involved in 253 adults with gliomas, 194 with meningiomas and 892 matched controls whose use of mobile phones was surveyed through a detailed questionnaire between 2004 and 2006.

Regular mobile phone users seemed to be 27% more likely to develop gliomas, but not meningiomas compared with non-users.

Those who had made a total of greater than 18,360 calls were found 110% more likely to develop gliomas.

"Risks were higher for gliomas, temporal tumours, occupational and urban mobile phone use," the study also discovered.

The researchers concluded "These additional data support previous findings concerning a possible association between heavy mobile phone use and brain tumours."

The current study is consistent with studies by Dr. L. Hardell from University Hospital in Örebro, Sweden.  

Dr.  Hardell is probably the one and only brilliant epidemiologist who found a strong association between long-term use of mobile phones and increased risk of brain cancer.  He not long ago published a study in Neuroepidemiology that shows users of mobile phones and cordless phones who developed brain cancer were less likely to survive. (David Liu)