This week, there has been press coverage of the Danish study of the impact of the incidence of cancer among long term cell phone users. The study concludes:
We found no evidence for an association between tumor risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users. Moreover, the narrow confidence intervals provide evidence that any large association of risk of cancer and cellular telephone use can be excluded.
In addition, the study found no trend that associates cancer rates with years of mobile phone use.
A couple of interesting notes from this study. First, this week’s publication is actually a follow-up to a study published more than 5 years ago. The 2001 report had similar findings.
In 1968 Denmark adopted a unique 10-digit identifier for each citizen, and a central population register to verify personal data and information. This tag enabled researchers to work with the phone companies to identify more than 420,000 long term users in whom information about mobile telephone use could be linked to a Danish cancer registry. More than 85% of the subjects were men.
Both studies found that cell phone use was associated with a reduced incidence of smoking related cancers (such as lung cancer). Why? The effect is likely associated with the group that was studied: long term cell phone users. As observed by the study, such users appeared to have a higher income and smoke less than the general population.
Maybe smokers are talking instead of inhaling!