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Mobile phone study to establish
long-term risks
Nic Fleming
London
Telegraph
Saturday September 8, 2007
Ministers will launch a multi-million pound, large-scale study
next week into long-term health risks of mobile phone use.
The decision indicates that mobile phone use has not yet been
given a clean bill of health even though a Government committee
is poised to report that research shows no proven health hazards
associated with mobiles.
The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) programme,
which has provided funding for 28 studies since 2001, will present
its findings on Wednesday.
However, because cancers can take at least a decade to develop
and mobile use has only been widespread for a little more than
a decade, Prof Lawrie Challis, the group's chairman, believes
a large study monitoring the health of users over a long period
is needed.
(Article continues below)
Funding has been promised by the Government and industry.
Prof Challis has previously said that he wanted 200,000 volunteers
to be monitored for at least five years to see whether those who
used mobiles the most were at an increased risk of diseases including
cancers, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
The MTHR has allocated £8.4 million to researchers, and
most of the 23 studies so far completed have been published. Next
week's report will interpret these findings and summarise other
recent research.
The difficulties in designing experiments and interpreting results
have been illustrated by the Interphone study - a comparison of
the mobile use of 7,000 people with tumours and a similar number
without across 13 countries including Britain.
The final report, by the Lyons-based International Agency for
Research on Cancer, is expected to be published early next year.
However many of the groups within Interphone have already released
the findings from their countries, and the interpretations of
these results have been contradictory. Results from the Danish
branch of the study suggested there were links between mobile
use and brain tumours.
The Finnish group concluded that people who had used their phones
for at least 10 years had a 39 per cent increased risk of developing
nervous system tumours called gliomas on the side of their heads
they held their handsets.
Findings have varied because the numbers of long-term users in
the studies have been small, and researchers mainly had to rely
on participants accurately reporting the length of mobile use,
frequency of their calls and the side of the head they used them
on. Almost all previous research on long-term effects has involved
"case-control" studies in which the phone use of people
with tumours was compared with matched healthy individuals.
Those leading the research may seek access to billing records
from mobile operators to get around the problem of volunteers
failing to report mobile use accurately.
Prof Lennart Hardell, an oncologist at the University Hospital
in Orebro, Sweden, published a review combining the results of
16 previous studies in April.
This concluded those who had used a mobile for 10 years or more
had double the risk of developing a glioma and were 2.4 times
more likely to be diagnosed with a tumour on a nerve connecting
the ear to the brain.
Prof Hardell said yesterday: "It has been shown pretty consistently
in studies that there is an increased risk of brain tumours for
people using mobile phones for at least 10 years.
"We should be adopting the precautionary principle.
"Cars should be fitted with external antennas, people should
use hands-free kits and children should only make calls in emergencies."
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