Cellphones Don't Cause Cancer, Huge Study Finds

Biggest study of its kind can't find a link
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 21, 2011 9:44 AM CDT
Cellphones Don't Cause Cancer, Huge Study Finds
Don't worry, guy, you won't get cancer from that phone.   (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

If you've been living with the nagging fear that your beloved cellphone is probably giving you a brain tumor, you can relax now; a new Danish study published yesterday has concluded that there's no link between cellphones and cancer. The study is the largest ever conducted on the subject, with 358,403 participants, the AP reports. Researchers found that decade-long cellphone users weren't any more likely to get cancer, or to develop tumors near where they typically hold their phones.

"Our study provides little evidence for a causal association," one of the paper's authors said, though she cautioned that "we cannot rule out a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users." One group that believes cellphones pose a health risk dismissed the study, saying its time frame—1990 to 2007—wasn't long enough to show long-term effects. Studies on the subject are becoming increasingly difficult, because roughly three-quarters of the world's population now carries a cellphone, making it hard to populate control groups. (More cellphones stories.)

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