Cell phones won't give you brain cancer

Ah, the never-ending dance revolving around the questionable link between mobile phones and cancer. It's like Ross and Rachel, Sam and Diane, Cigarettes and Cancer--mostly like the last one. However, a new study from Tokyo Women's Medical University has reported that after looking at phone use by 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people, regular phone use (at least once a week for 6 months) does not increase your likelihood of getting cancer.

Of course, if you live in the country and gab more over your phone than your fence, you'll probably still get a tumor in your salivary glands--but that's for quibbling. You'll also stop sleeping. And age like a zombie--but no cancer!

The study claims to be the first to look at "the different exposure levels inside the intracranial space," minimizing risk of confusion and bias.

"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," said researcher Professor Naohito Yamaguchi.

The study looked at patients with glioma, meningioma or pituitary adenoma, which together account for 85% of brain cancers. The researchers then looked at how long and how heavily the patients had used cell phones, different types of radiation emitted by different phones, and how likely each type of radiation was to affect the brain.

Results: We're safe!

Counter-point: "Interestingly, in this research they noted an increase in glioma on the side of the head where the phone is used but put it down to reporting bias," a spokesperson for the campaign group Mast Sanity told the BBC. "Industry and government funded studies tend to do this but it is not scientific to dismiss results that are inconvenient."

Counter-counter-point: Actually, multiple other studies with small increases in reported glioma attributed it to reporting bias since that's where the patient knew the tumor was. Also, the largest study to date looked at 20,000 people over ten years of use and found bupkis for connections.

This is the point where our metaphorical Sam and Diane (maybe Frasier at this point) just blast each other with radio waves, ending it all in one glorious heap of confusion.

[via Reuters and BBC. The results have been reported in the British Journal of Cancer.]