To the Editor,
Recent results of cell-phone tumor studies are much more consistent than your news item, “Conflicting studies muddy cell-phone health risks,” in RCR Wireless News on Jan. 30 would have us believe. As you noted, Lennart Hardell has reported an increased risk of acoustic neuroma (a benign tumor of the cranial nerve) following long-term cell-phone use. A Swedish team, which is part of the Interphone study group, published a similar finding back in 2004 (“Industry urges more research after study links cell-phone use, tumors,” RCR Wireless News, Oct. 18, 2004). Then last summer, researchers from five (including Sweden and the U.K.) of the 13 countries working on Interphone pooled their data and found an 80-percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, after 10 years, on the same side (ipsilateral) of the head as the cell phone was used. Hardell has also reported a brain tumor-cell phone link. On Jan. 20, the U.K. Interphone team announced in the British Medical Journal that they had found a statistically significant higher risk of ipsilateral brain tumors. And a week later, the German Interphone researchers released their results in the American Journal of Epidemiology showing a more than doubling of brain tumors among those with 10 or more years of cell-phone use.
To be sure, there are still many methodological issues to be worked out, but it is already clear that the cell phone-tumor risk needs priority attention.
Louis Slesin, Ph.D. Editor, Microwave News New York City
RCR Wireless News welcomes letters to the editor. E-mail them to talk2rcr@crain.com.
