Using cellphones doesn't increase children's cancer risk, according to a new study, the latest in a series of papers that find no link between the phones and brain tumors.
Scientists say the study is important, because it is the first of its kind to focus on children.
The study's authors compared the cellphone habits of nearly 1,000 children in Western Europe, including 352 with brain tumors and 646 without. Kids who used cellphones were no more likely to develop a brain tumor than others, according to the study of children ages 7 to 19 published online Wednesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Scientists have been eagerly awaiting these results, says Martha Linet, a doctor at the National Cancer Institute who wasn't involved in the study. "It's very reassuring," she says.
Researchers, led by Denis Aydin of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, looked at data in several ways, searching for possible trends with long-term use. They found no increase in brain tumors among children who had used cellphones for five years or more, according to the study, funded by European health agencies.
In the study, Aydin and colleagues note that radio frequency electromagnetic fields created by cellphones penetrate deeper into kids' brains, mainly because kids' skulls are smaller. Recent studies have suggested that small children's brains absorb about twice as much mobile phone energy as adults' brains.
But authors also note that this energy, unlike radiation from X-rays or CT scans, isn't strong enough to damage DNA, cause mutations and lead to cancer. And while many people are concerned about cellphones, no one has come up with a way to explain how they might cause cancer, Linet says.
If cellphones caused brain tumors, researchers might expect to find those tumors on the side of the head where kids hold their phones. In the new study, however, children had the lowest risk of tumors in the part of the brain exposed to the most cellphone energy, write scientists John Boice and Robert Tarone in an accompanying editorial. They note that there has been no increase in brain tumors -- among kids or adults -- since cellphones came into widespread use in the 1990s.
But the study also produced some contradictory findings. In a small subset of children, researchers found a higher risk of brain tumors in children whose cellphone subscriptions had begun more than 2.8 years ago.
Overall, however, parents should find these results reassuring, says pediatrician Rachel Vreeman, of the Indiana University School of Medicine. "This is a good piece of evidence that parents don't need to be panicked," she says.
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