Radiation risk from cellular phones

In the 1990s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) restricted its risk assessment for human exposure to radiofrequency radiation (RFR) in seven ways: (1) Inappropriate focus on heat, ignoring sub-thermal effects. (2) Reliance on exposure experiments performed over very short times. (3) Overlooking time/amplitude characteristics of RFR signals. (4) Ignoring carcinogenicity, hypersensitivity, and other health conditions connected with RFR. (5) Measuring cellphone Specific Absorption Rates (SAR) at arbitrary distances from the head...

Cell phones operate with a wide range of frequency bands and emit radiofrequency-electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR). Concern on the possible health hazards of RF-EMR has been growing in many countries because these RF-EMR pulses may be absorbed into the body cells, directly affecting them. There are some in vitro and in vivo animal studies related to the consequences of RF-EMR exposure from cell phones on embryo development and offspring. In addition, some studies have revealed that RF-EMR from cellular phone may lead to decrease in the rates of fertilization and embryo development, as well as the risk of the developmental anomalies, other studies have reported that it does not interfere with in vitro fertilization or intracytoplasmic sperm injection success rates, or the chromosomal aberration rate...

The use of mobile phone related technologies will continue to increase in the foreseeable future worldwide. This has drawn attention to the probable interaction of radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation with different biological targets. Studies have been conducted on various organisms to evaluate the alleged ill-effect on health. We have therefore attempted to review those work limited to in vitro cultured cells where irradiation conditions were well controlled. Different investigators have studied varied endpoints like DNA damage, cell cycle arrest, reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation, cellular morphology and viability to weigh the genotoxic effect of such radiation by utilizing different frequencies and dose rates under various irradiation conditions that include continuous or pulsed exposures and also amplitude- or frequency-modulated waves...

Breast cancer occurring in women under the age of 40 is uncommon in the absence of family history or genetic predisposition, and prompts the exploration of other possible exposures or environmental risks. We report a case series of four young women-ages from 21 to 39-with multifocal invasive breast cancer that raises the concern of a possible association with nonionizing radiation of electromagnetic field exposures from cellular phones. All patients regularly carried their smartphones directly against their breasts in their brassieres for up to 10 hours a day, for several years, and developed tumors in areas of their breasts immediately underlying the phones...

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radiofrequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic. Previous studies have focused on intracranial tumors, although the skin receives much radiation. In a nationwide cohort study, 355,701 private mobile phone subscribers in Denmark from 1987 to 1995 were followed up through 2007. We calculated incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma by using Poisson regression models adjusted for age, calendar period, educational level, and income...

With 5.9 billion reported users, mobile phones constitute a new, ubiquitous and rapidly growing exposure worldwide. Mobile phones are two-way microwave radios that also emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation. Inconsistent results have been published on potential risks of brain tumors tied with mobile phone use as a result of important methodological differences in study design and statistical power. Some studies have examined mobile phone users for periods of time that are too short to detect an increased risk of brain cancer, while others have misclassified exposures by placing those with exposures to microwave radiation from cordless phones in the control group, or failing to attribute such exposures in the cases...

In May 2011, the IARC Working Group discussed the possibility that exposure to RF-EMF (radiofrequency electromagnetic fields) have to produce an increased risk for brain tumors and evaluated the available literature on different categories of subjects exposed, including, among others, a Danish cohort study, five case-control studies and the largest multi-center case-control study (INTERPHONE) on the use of mobile phone and brain tumors, including glioma, meningioma and acoustic neuroma. The Working Group also examined a number of studies with objectives related to various mechanisms ofcarcerogenesis...

The precautionary principle, according to the European Commission (February 2, 2000) must be applied when there is a possibility of a danger to humans, animals and/or environment health, i.e. when the potential harmful effects have been identified by a scientific and objective evaluation, but this evaluation does not allow the risk to be determined with sufficient certainty. However this principle has been invoked, without the identification, even partial, of harmful effects, to justify preventive and protective measures deemed necessary by policy maker mainly due to a high (but unjustified) risk perception by the population...

BACKGROUND: There is a public health need to balance timely generation of hypotheses with cautious causal inference. For rare cancers this is particularly challenging because standard epidemiological study designs may not be able to elucidate causal factors in an early period of newly emerging risks. Alternative methodologies need to be considered for generating and shaping hypotheses prior to definitive investigation. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate whether open-access databases can be used to explore links between potential risk factors and cancers at an ecological level, using the case study of brain and nervous system cancers as an example...

For years, radiofrequency (RF) and microwave (MW) radiations have been applied in the modern world. The rapidly increasing use of cellular phones called recent attention to the possible health risks of RF/MW exposures. In 2011, a group of international experts organized by IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon) concluded that RF/MW radiations should be listed as a possible carcinogen (group 2B) for humans. Three meta-analyses of case-control studies have concluded that using cell phones for more than ten years was associated with an increase in the overall risk of developing a brain tumor...

OBJECT: The authors evaluated the potential role of environmental risk factors, including exposure to diagnostic or therapeutic radiation and to wireless phones that emit nonionizing radiation, in the etiology of vestibular schwannoma (VS). METHODS: A total of 343 patients with VSs who underwent Gamma Knife surgery performed between 1997 and 2007 were age and sex matched to 343 control patients from the outpatient degenerative spinal disorders service at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center...

The purpose of this study was to assess risk perception related to living near a cell phone tower based on data from two national telephone surveys conducted in France in 2005 and 2010. In 2005, 48.5% of French people aged 16-75 years considered that living near a cell phone tower increases the risk of cancer, compared to 68.9% in 2010. In addition, the number of ?don't know' responses decreased. The increase in risk perception was far greater than the increase in perceptions related to other potential environmental factors of cancer (nuclear power plant, air pollution, chemically-treated food)...

The incidence of brain neoplasm has been progressively increasing in recent years in the industrialized countries. One of the reasons for this increased incidence could be better access to health care and improved diagnosis in the industrialized countries. It also appears that Caucasians have a higher incidence than blacks or Hispanics or Asians. A number of risk factors have been identified and described including the genetic, ethnic and age-based factors. Certain occupational and environmental factors are also believed to influence the risk of primary adult brain tumors...

This population-based case-control study in Taiwan considered incident cases aged 15 years or less and admitted in 2003 to 2007 for all neoplasm (ICD-9-CM: 140-239) (n=2606), including 939 leukemia and 394 brain neoplasm cases. Controls were randomly selected, with a case/control ratio of 1:30 and matched on year of birth, from all non-neoplasm children insured in the same year when the index case was admitted. Annual summarized power (ASP, watt-year) was calculated for each of the 71,185 mobile phone base stations (MPBS) in service between 1998 and 2007...

Estimating exposure-outcome associations using laterality information on exposure and on outcome is an issue, when estimating associations of mobile phone use and brain tumour risk. The exposure is localized; therefore, a potential risk is expected to exist primarily on the side of the head, where the phone is usually held (ipsilateral exposure), and to a lesser extent at the opposite side of the head (contralateral exposure). Several measures of the associations with ipsilateral and contralateral exposure, dealing with different sampling designs, have been presented in the literature...

Public concern about possible health effects of EMF radiation from mobile phone masts has led to an increase of epidemiological studies and health risk assessments which, in turn, require adequate methods of exposure estimation. Difficulties in exposure modelling are exacerbated both by the complexity of the propagation processes, and the need to obtain estimates for large study populations in order to provide sufficient statistical power to detect or exclude the small relative risks that might exist. Use of geographical information system (GIS) techniques offers the means to make such computations efficiently...

Mobile phones work by transmitting and receiving radio frequency microwave radiation. The radio frequency (RF) emitted by mobile phones is stronger than FM radio signal which are known to cause cancer. Though research and evidence available on the risk of cancer by mobile phones does not provide a clear and direct support that mobile phones cause cancers. Evidence does not also support an association between exposure to radio frequency and microwave radiation from mobile phones and direct effects on health...

Neurobehavioral disorders are increasingly prevalent in children, however their etiology is not well understood. An association between prenatal cellular telephone use and hyperactivity in children has been postulated, yet the direct effects of radiofrequency radiation exposure on neurodevelopment remain unknown. Here we used a mouse model to demonstrate that in-utero radiofrequency exposure from cellular telephones does affect adult behavior. Mice exposed in-utero were hyperactive and had impaired memory as determined using the object recognition, light/dark box and step-down assays...

This paper describes an experimental setup for evaluating the physiological effects of radiofrequency (RF) emitted from a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) module with a 24 dBm at 1950 MHz for specific absorption rate (SAR(1g)) of 1.57 W/kg. This provocation study was executed in a double-blind study of two volunteer groups of 10 self-reported electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and 10 non-EHS subjects under both sham and real exposures in a randomly assigned and counter-balanced order. In the preliminary results, WCDMA RF exposure of 30 min did not have any effects on physiological changes in either group...

BACKGROUND: In the past 15 years, mobile telephone use has evolved from an uncommon activity to one with > 4.6 billion subscriptions worldwide. However, there is public concern about the possibility that mobile phones might cause cancer, especially brain tumors. OBJECTIVES: We reviewed the evidence on whether mobile phone use raises the risk of the main types of brain tumor—glioma and meningioma—with a particular focus on the recent publication of the largest epidemiologic study yet: the 13-country Interphone Study...