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ABC News -Reuters
Mar 31, 2005 - By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Another study that investigated the potential link between mobile phone use and brain cancer adds to the growing body of evidence against any such association, even among long-time users of mobile phones.
"Overall, the majority of the published studies have found no indication of increased risk of brain tumors, and our results are in agreement with these results," study author Dr. Stefan Lonn of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm told Reuters Health.
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While most previous investigations into the cell phone-brain cancer association have yielded negative results, a few researchers have reported that exposure to radiofrequency radiation puts cell-phone users at increased risk of brain cancer. However, none of these studies were conducted long enough to properly address the issue.
Lonn and colleagues therefore studied 644 individuals, between 20 and 69 years old, with either glioma or meningioma - the two most common forms of brain tumor. For comparison, their study also included 674 men and women who were of similar age and gender and lived in the same residential areas as the study participants.
Overall, men and women who reported regularly using their mobile phone - at least once a week during the previous six months - for any amount of time were not found to have a significantly greater risk of developing a brain tumor than those who did not report regular mobile phone use. This remained true even among those who said they had used a mobile phone for 10 years or longer, the report indicates.
"We observed no increased risk of glioma or meningioma related to mobile phone use, regardless of tumor histology, type of phone, and duration of use," the authors write in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The researchers also looked at the location of the study participants´ tumors, based on the notion that the highest risk of brain tumor would be on the side of the head that receives the most exposure to radiofrequency -