Preliminary comments on “Cellular Telephone Use and the Risk of Brain Tumors: Update of the UK Million Women Study”
Like the earlier cell phone-brain tumor risk study that used data from the UK Million Women study (Benson et al., 2013), the current study (Schüz et al., 2022) is methodologically unsound due to limited assessment of cell phone use over time and misclassification of exposure. Furthermore, participant attrition from this prospective longitudinal study was very high which likely contributed to the fact that few participants in the main analysis were heavy lifetime cell phone users.
Thus, the study provides no assurance of safety to current cell phone users who use their phones more or start using at a younger age. The results of this study are also limited to the study population, namely middle-aged and elderly women who lived in the United Kingdom (UK).
In the current study, only 18% of cell phone users talked on cell phones more than 30
minutes per week which corresponds to about 4 minutes per day or 26 hours per year which amounts to about 260 hours over a 10-year period — far less use than what it would take to see a statistically significant association with brain tumor incidence. Even among daily users, only 41% talked on their cell phones this much.
In contrast, we found in our meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies that “cellular phone use with cumulative call time more than 1000 hours statistically significantly increased the risk of tumors” which corresponds to at least 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period (Choi, Moskowitz et al., 2020).
The current study failed to (measure or) control for cordless phone use, a potential confounder, which likely increases brain tumor risk. Furthermore, the authors did not report whether they analyzed participant attrition (68%) to determine the extent to which this may have biased the study results.
“Our findings support the accumulating evidence that cellular telephone use under usual conditions does not increase brain tumor incidence.”
Joachim Schüz, Kirstin Pirie, Gillian K Reeves, Sarah Floud, Valerie Beral, for the Million Women Study Collaborators. Cellular Telephone Use and the Risk of Brain Tumors: Update of the UK Million Women Study. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2022, djac042, doi: 10.1093/jnci/djac042.
Open access paper: https://bit.ly/UKwomen2022
No Link Between Cell Phones and Brain Tumors in Large UK Study
https://www.saferemr.com/2022/03/the-uk-million-women-study-of-cell.html
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