Owners of older mobile telephones are at substantially greater risk of contracting a brain tumour, a Swedish study published in the current issue of the European Journal of Cancer Prevention reveals.
Researchers spent four years studying 1 617 patients with brain tumours in central Sweden — in what they said was the largest study so far into first-generation mobile phones and cancer risk ? and compared them with a healthy control group.
The result showed that users of Nordic Mobil Telephone (NMT) phones were from 1,3 to 3,5 times greater at risk of developing cancer than those who did not use those phones.
”It is clear that NMT users should exercise caution,” Kjell Hansson Mild of the Swedish National Instititue for Working Life, co-author of the study along with Lennart Hardell of Orebro University Hospital, said.
Hansson Mild carried out his study on users of first-generation NMT mobile phones, looking at the short-term risk of cancer, and over a 10-year period.
NMT users were shown to run a 1,3 times greater risk, and over a 10-year period the overall tumour risk was 1,8 times greater, the study showed.
The risk of a tumour developing in the temporal lobe of the brain — on the side of the head where the phone is used — was two and a half times higher. Still higher were the chances of tumours in the auditory nerve, there they leapt to 3,5 times, the study showed.
Hansson Mild said that the risk of cancer was not as clearly established for users of GSM phones, the most-widely used type of mobile phone today.
But he also pointed out that GSM phones had not yet been in circulation for many years, and no one in the study had been using such a phone for more than a decade.
”Although we can see similar tendencies (with GSM phones), any conclusions regarding these phones must wait until the results of other ongoing studies are published,” he said. – Sapa-AFP