A recent study has linked frequent mobile or wireless phone use to glioma, a certain kind of deadly cancer, and suggests that those who have been using their mobile phones for 25 years have thrice the risk of developing the disease compared to those with one year of wireless phone use.
The study also said that the rate at which glioma develops depends on the number of hours of use of these mobile phones.
Reports from Fox News said that lead researcher Dr. Lennart Hardell, an oncologist from University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, and his colleague Michael Carlberg matched 1,380 patients with malignant brain tumors to people without such tumors and compared their wireless phone use.
In the study, those who recalled talking the most -- more than 1,486 hours -- on wireless phones were twice as likely to develop glioma compared to those who said they used the devices the fewest hours -- between one and 122 hours, the study found.
Hardell in an interview with Reuters Health said, "the risk is three times higher after 25 years of use. We can see this clearly."
Despite the seen increase in the chances of getting the brain cancer with mobile phone use, study results said that the odds of actually developing glioma are still low. According to the study, slightly more than five out of 100,000 Europeans got diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor between 1995 and 2002. It also did not show any link of wireless phones with other malignant brain tumors other than glioma.
This new study contradicts the international Interphone study in 2010 where it failed to find strong evidence that mobile phones increased the risk of brain tumors.
The use of cell phones in the United States tripled between 2000 and 2010, but the rates of cancer in parts of the brain due to cell phone use had not gone up at the time of 2010.
A World Health Organization panel classified mobile phones as "possibly carcinogenic" in 2011. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is currently reassessing the safe radiation exposure limits it adopted in 1996.
The National Cancer Institute said that mobile phones emit radiofrequency energy, which can be absorbed by tissues closest to where the phone is held. "Studies thus far have not shown a consistent link between cell phone use and cancers of the brain, nerves, or other tissues of the head or neck," it said.
