The controversy about a possible relationship between mobile phone use and cancer

Michael Kundi
2010 Ciência & Saúde Coletiva  
Over the last decade, mobile phone use increased to almost 100% prevalence in many countries. Evidence for potential health hazards accumulated in parallel by epidemiologic investigations has raised controversies about the appropriate interpretation and the degree of bias and confounding responsible for reduced or increased risk estimates. Overall, 33 epidemiologic studies were identified in the peer-reviewed literature, mostly (25) about brain tumors. Methodologic considerations revealed that
more » ... hree important conditions for epidemiologic studies to detect an increased risk are not met:no evidence-based exposure metric is available; the observed duration of mobile phone use is generally still too low; no evidence-based selection of end points among the grossly different types of neoplasias is possible because of lack of etiologic hypotheses. The overall evidence speaks in favor of an increased risk, but its magnitude cannot be assessed at present because of insufficient information on long-term use.
doi:10.1590/s1413-81232010000500016 pmid:20802874 fatcat:jaztj4m265dnnixjau6dutzjtu