Despite What Robert F. Kennedy Wants You To Think, Cell Phones Do Not Cause Brain Cancer
Robert F. Kennedy, the secretary of Health and Human Services, still believes that cell phones are causing brain cancer, as revealed in a congressional hearing in January.
But numerous studies going back to the year 2000 all indicate there is no particular reason to fear cell phones as a cause of cancer, and a new paper by Li Zhang and Joshua Muscat of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Pennsylvania State University examines the most up-to-date data from the United States to examine this question as if for the first time.Â
Most studies on this question so far have been case-control studies. This type of study is subject to biases (information bias and selection bias) because it selects subjects who already have the disease of interest (in this case, brain cancer). Although prospective studies avoid the biases inherent in case-control studies, they are expensive and difficult to carry out, especially for rare diseases such as brain cancer.
But now researchers can take advantage of the exponential increase in exposure to cell phones since their introduction in the mid-1980s. In the space of several decades, humans have gone from having no exposure—zero percent of the population exposed—to nearly universal exposure. This means that we can take advantage of what is referred to as a “natural experiment,” the approach that Li and Muscat take in their illuminating new study.
An earlier analysis of this type was carried out by the National Cancer Institute. That study showed no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancer, but the data only went up to 2012. Possibly cell phones had not been in use long enough for an effect to show up. Li and Muscat extend the period of observation by nine years.
The authors plotted the total number of cell phone subscriptions in the U.S. for the period 1985-2024 and used data on brain cancer and brain tumor incidence from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program for the years 2000 to 2021 to calculate the annual percentage change (APC) in the incidence of brain cancer and non-malignant tumors of the brain. The SEER database for this period covers 47.9 percent of the U.S. population.
From 1985 to 2021, there was a 1,200-fold increase in the number of cell phone subscriptions in the United States (Figure 1).
Along with this dramatic increase in cell phone use, a slight decline in annual percent change for malignant brain tumors occurred, and no change in temporal lobe tumors appeared from 2000 to 2021 (Figure 2).
There was a slight increase in benign tumors (mainly meningiomas), but this is likely to be due to an increased use of medical imaging during this period discovering tumors that earlier would have gone undetected.
For acoustic neuromas (vestibular schwannomas), malignant pediatric brain t
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