Major study reveals that there is "some evidence" of a link between the radiation of a cell phone and brain cancer

The rodents participating in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years – much longer than the heavy users of mobile phones. For rats, exposures started before birth and continued until the age of about 2 years.

About 2 to 3% of the male rats exposed to radiation developed a malignant glioma, a fatal cancer of the brain, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists do not see any overall increase in the incidence of gliomas in the human population.

The study also found that approximately 5 to 7% of male rats exposed to the highest radiation level developed certain cardiac tumors, called malignant tumors. schwannomas, compared to none in the control group. Malignant schwannomas are similar to acoustic neuromas, benign tumors that can develop in humans, in the nerve that connects the ear to the brain.

The rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, characteristic of the second generation of cell phones that prevailed in the 1990s, at the time of study design.

Today's cell phones represent a fourth generation, called 4G, and 5G phones are expected to debut by 2020. They use much higher frequencies, and these radio waves are much less successful in penetrating the bodies of humans and rats , according to scientists.

In June, at a meeting of the toxicology agency's scientific advisors, Donald Stump, one of the members, feared that the study "would be exposed to criticism that it would have been made using technologies obsolete. " move forward with experiments which are big enough to be significant but agile enougho keep pace with rapidly changing devices.

The toxicology agency is building smaller exhibition rooms that will allow it to evaluate new technologies in a matter of weeks or months, instead of several years. These future studies will focus on measurable physical signs, or biomarkers, of the potential effects of radio-frequency radiation, including DNA damage, which can be detected much earlier than cancer.