By Tom Secrest
06 FEB 2010
With the exception of implantable cardiac devices, there are few pieces of technology with which we have such intimate contact. Depending on how much time you spend on the phone the amount of contact can range from less than a minute per day to perhaps hours per day. What makes mobile phone use special is that we press these devices against our heads as part of normal use.
People have been worried about potential health effects of mobile phones for many years. The concern may date back to April 3, 1973 when Martin Cooper of Motorola, made the first modern mobile phone call to, his engineering rival, Joel Engel of Bell Labs. With almost forty years of use, you would think we would have a respectable amount of data regarding potential health effects.
As it turns out there have been numerous studies that have examined the link between various forms of tumors and cancers and mobile phone use. However, at best, the results of these studies are inconclusive. Some studies found links to both benign and malignant tumors, while other studies actually found that mobile phone use was protective and reported odds ratios less than 1.
The question becomes what to do with multiple studies that present conflicting results. The well-established answer is to do a meta-analysis. In the November 20, 2009 issue of Journal of Clinical Oncology, Seung-Kwon MD presented the results of his meta-analysis on this subject. His conclusion was that the use of mobile phones was not significantly associated with the risk of tumors compared to people who infrequently or never used mobile phones.
However, the beauty of a meta-analysis is that you can create subsets of studies and then draw additional conclusions. In a subset of 13 studies, the research group found that those with more than a 10 year history of mobile phone use did have a significantly higher risk of tumors.
In another subset, they found that research that had, at least in part, been funded by groups associated with the mobile phone industry, generally showed protective effects from phone use, while a subset without any association with the mobile phone industry, generally, reported higher risks of both benign and malignant tumors, or no effects at all.
While we scientists like to believe that we are beyond corruption, this inconclusive meta-analysis may offer a valuable lesson – sometimes you get exactly what you pay for.
Additionally, the meta-analysis may provide us with a good reason to go buy one of those ear-piece microphone headsets. But be prepared, we will, no doubt, have to wait another 30 years before there is a meta-analysis of studies regarding the effects of sticking a short length radio wave transmitter, i.e. Bluetooth, in your ear.
