The latest research into the link between mobile phone use and brain cancer has proved inconclusive, despite lasting for a decade and costing nearly €20 million.
Backed by the World Health Organisation, the research pr
ogram
was intended to provide a defin
itive view on the potential link b
etween phone use and brain tumo
rs, after a number of unrelated studies provided conflicting evidence.
However, while the latest research found suggestions that mobile phone use resulted in an increased risk of the g
lioma and meningioma brain tumo
rs among users with the highest levels of exposure, the report cautioned that “biases and error prevent a causal interpretation.”
Users classed as having ‘high’ exposure talked for
more than 30 minutes on their handsets
each day for the past 10 years.
Overall, the report states, “no increase in risk in glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones.”
And some evidence suggests a decreased risk of meningioma for people who had been using phones regularly, in a result the authors acknowledged “makes [the] results difficult to interpret.”
The report was authored by Interphone study group, and organised by the Internat
ional Agency for Research on Cancer, and was the
largest investigation into the matter
to date, costing €19.2 million over the past decade.
It involved sixte
en study center
s from 13 countries, including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK.
The report concluded that the results may have been tainted by factors including selection and sampling bias.
However, the report has been criticised because mobile phone companies provided a
quarter of the funding
, the
BBC
reports.
Other criticisms stem from the fact that the study relied on self-reporting to determine how often subjects used mobile phones.
An even larger study, involving 250,000 participants over 20-30 years, was last month
launched
in Europe, partly sponsored by the government's mobile telecommunications health research (MTHR) program.