With cellphone use soaring among children globally, the results of a first-of-its-kind study may ease some concerns that the radio frequency waves emitted by cellphones are harmful to their developing and sensitive brains.
A growing number of studies have found no conclusive link between cellphone use by adults and cancer risk. But researchers have still worried that children could be vulnerable.
According to the paper published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, those fears can largely be discounted — at least when it comes to short-term use of cellphones. “Consistent with virtually all studies of adults exposed to radio frequency waves, no convincing evidence was found that children who use cellphones are at higher risk of developing a brain tumor than children who do not regularly use cellphones,” a commentary on the report says.
For the study, researchers from Switzerland compared cellphone use among 352 people ages 7 to 19 who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor between 2004 and 2008 with usage by 646 control subjects drawn randomly from the general population. The researchers found that regular users were no more likely to have developed a brain tumor than non-users. Similar percentages of children with, and without, brain tumors — 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively — had used a cellphone at least 20 times before diagnosis, suggesting there is no “causal association between the use of mobile phones and brain tumors.”
The study “shows that a large and immediate risk of cellphones causing brain tumors in children can be excluded,” lead author Martin Roosli told The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper report cautioned that the subjects who took part in the study had been using their phones for an average of only about four years, which may not be long enough to show cancer risk. Moreover, the time they spent on voice calls — where the phone is held to the ear — was relatively short.
Another study, meanwhile, has found that growing up on a farm may be hazardous to a child’s health. Youngsters raised on chicken farms are the most vulnerable, three times more likely those raised in non-farm communities to develop blood cancers later in life, researchers from New Zealand concluded. The overall risk of diseases such as leukemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is 22 percent higher for those raised on livestock farms in general.
According to The Scotsman newspaper, scientists say that exposure to a particular types of virus in childhood may alter the immune system response, increasing the risk of blood cancer as an adult.
MATTHEW HELLER
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It’s important to note that this is a four year study, and it does nothing to answer what the potential long-term effects of cellphone usage will be 15-20-40 years out. For all the coolness and convenience of cellphones, we’re all engaged in a long-term biological experiment where the answers won’t be known for decades, and our children may be the ones who pay the highest price for the experiment of it turns out that long-term exposure is in fact hazardous to health.