In this day and age of modern convenience, it seems that just about everything can kill you…
Not surprisingly, we live in a culture of fear where everything from artificial sweeteners and egg yolks to acid wash jeans and hair dye can give you cancer.
And of course, there is no greater culprit out there than the cellular phone, which beams high energy waves directly into your brain causing irrevocable damage.
(Or, at least that’s what the media would have you believe.)
Although several studies in the past have suggested that extended cell phone use may lead to brain cancer, a new study out of Japan suggests otherwise.
According to a recent study at Tokyo Women’s Medical University, researchers found no increased risk of the three main types of brain cancer among regular cellular phone users.
In other words, extended cell phone use most likely does not raise the risk of developing brain tumors.
Shocked?
Skeptical?
Doubtful?
Intrigued?
Before moving to Japan, I used to be an epidemiologist in a former life (seriously!), so let me do my best to explain why you shouldn’t feel guilty about your ‘free nights and weekends’ cell plan.
In a study published in the British Journal of Cancer, Japanese researchers compared 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people in a trial to determine the long-term effects of using cell phones.
The researchers rated each test subject to determine two important variables: how many years they had been using a cell phone, and how many minutes they spent talking on it each day.
In what is being described as a breakthrough research method, the researchers also studied the radiation emitted from various types of cell phones, and categorized them based on radiation strength.
(In layman’s terms, we’re talking about how zap to the brain each phone lets out.)
Are you with me so far? Hope so!
According to lead researcher Professor Naohito Yamaguchi, “Using our newly developed and more accurate techniques, we found no association between mobile phone use and cancer, providing more evidence to suggest they don’t cause brain cancer.”
So there it is.
(Well, sort of…)
You see, the problem with medical science is that you can never fully prove or disapprove an association.
But, you can provide evidence to suggest the likelihood of one way or the other, which is why popular opinion on whether or not something is good for you can quickly swing.
However, most studies to date have suggested that cell phone usage is not association with an increased risk of cancer. The largest study to date, which followed 420,000 people for ten years, failed to find any evidence of a cancer trend.
So do cell phones give you brain cancer?
Most likely not, though it is impossible to rule out the long-term effects as cell phones haven’t been around long enough to analyze the effects of lifetime usage.
So, hopefully we should all have an answer to this question sometime in the next few decades…
Isn’t science fun?
** Brain image sourced from the Wikimedia Commons Project. Keitai images were shot by me on Takeshita-dori in Harajuku**