Nursing Comments

          If you haven’t watched the short video clip above, please do so – I found this rather startling piece on YouTube this morning.  It was taped on September 2, 2009.  Cell phone use among children is a massive uncontrolled experiment on the brain.  So says Devra Davis, PhD., award-winning scientist, writer and founder of Environmental Health Trust, a nonprofit devoted to researching and controlling avoidable environmental health threats.  “Children’s skulls are thinner and their brains are less dense so there’s more absorption of radio frequency signals,” she said at a recent event in San Francisco where she spoke about the Campaign for Safer Cell Phones.  She added that we don’t know the long term effects of using cell phones, and that the FDA has never tested cell phones for safety.  “If cell phones were a pharmaceutical drug,” she said, “they would never have gotten to market.” 

          Studies from around the world are now being released with some amazing news about using cell phone safety.  A Swedish study reports that radio waves from mobile phones penetrate deep into the brain not just around the ear.  Researchers found that using your cell phone for 10 years or longer will double the risk of getting an acoustic neuroma – a tumor on a nerve connecting your ear to your brain – and children, because they have thinner skulls than adults and nervous systems that are still developing, are particularly vulnerable to it.  Other scientists warn that there is a 420% greater chance that young people who start using a cell phone before age 20 will develop a brain tumor later in life.

          This issue has been a hot debate.  Do cell phones cause brain cancer or not?  More recent data and scientific studies have tried to assess both short term and long term impact of cell phone usage.  There has been no conclusive evidence so far that radiation from cell phone use leads to brain cancer.  But, earlier research studies did not have a pool of users available who had been on their cell phones long enough.  In other words, studies have not yet been able to follow people for very long periods of time.  When tumors form after a known cancer-causing exposure, it usually takes decades for them to develop.  Because cell phones have been in widespread use for less than 20 years in most countries, it is not possible to rule out future health effects that have not yet appeared.  Nevertheless, taken as a whole, most studies to date have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors.  

          We also need to keep in mind that the studies done so far have focused on adults, not children.  Cell phone use is now widespread even among young children.  It is possible that if there are health effects, they might be more pronounced in children because their nervous systems are still developing and their lifetime exposure will be greater than adults, who started at a later age.  Finally, the measurement of cell phone use in most studies has been crude.  Most have been case-control studies.  These types of studies have relied on people’s memories for information about past cell phone usage, which may or may not be dependable.  A team of researchers in northern Europe, however, has now combed through three decades of cancer registries and found no increase in the rate of brain tumors in the 5 to 10 years following widespread cell phone adoption in that region.  “I don’t think five to 10 years does cover it,” says David Carpenter, a professor of environmental health sciences and biomedical sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York.  ”Brain cancers are slow growing, so the idea that you would be able to detect something after five years would be surprising,” he says.  ”Time will tell, but likely the biggest increase will be after 20 years.”

          As cell phones and smart phones take over more communication, information and entertainment functions, concerns remain about their possible role in causing brain cancer.  Last year alone, several studies and review articles have posited tentative links between radiation produced by cellular phones and the development of brain tumors.  I guess the jury is still out on this ongoing debate.  In general, expert agencies (Federal Drug Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Toxicology Program and the National Cancer Institute) agree that most evidence to date does not point to cell phone use increasing the risk of tumors, but that more research is needed to look at possible long-term effects.

WORKS CITED

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ped/content/ped_1_3x_cellular_phones.asp 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3IDdRlNRz4

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cancer-cells-brain-tumor

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