Review nº 12

Name: Cristina Soledad Guzmán
Source: www.economist.com
Date of publication: September 25th 2008


Review nº 12: Article ‘Mobile madness’

Do cell phones cause cancer? That is the question that this year users have been making, and up to now it remains without a determined answer. A five-year scientific research called Interphone has been carried out, but its results are still difficult to be established. The article ‘Mobile madness’ from The Economist, deals with this public uncertainty.
Mobile phone users are more confused than enlightened, with reports alterning between alarming claims and soothing reassurances about the use of cell phones and the possibility of getting cancer out of it. A study called Interphone began in 2000 and ended in 2006, with scientists working in 13 countries, it has still to come to a settled conclusion. The results of nine of the 13 single-country studies have been made available, and the consequence is a farrago of misinformation. Some findings were so counter-intuitive that it has led most of the people involved to acknowledge serious flaws in the study’s design. One problem was what statisticians call selection bias. The study was done interviewing people who had had the cancer of interest about their past use of mobile phones. The research then approached a number of healthy people in order to compare both groups. The problem here was that the definition of a “regular mobile-phone use” was itself questionable. Another flaw is that those interviewed about their mobile use a decade earlier will have been using analogue, not digital, handsets, leading to a different pattern of exposure and therefore of potential risk. The recall bias flaw means that asking people about past behaviour, and relying on the accuracy of their memories is not very reliable. The Interphone researchers are split into three camps; one believes any increased incidence of tumours shown in the study is purely the result of the biases; another thinks it really has found increased risks of certain tumours and wants to call for precautionary measures; a third group is just keeping quiet.
This article follows the saga of an investigation to find out whether or not mobile phones are damaging people’s brains. But scientists have not reached to a conclusion due to many flaws in the recollection and reliability of the information obtained.
In conclusion, follow-up studies analysing prospective as well as retrospective data are more likely to be trustful though they would take longer to come to a conclusion.