Cellphones and Brain Cancer

Find out whether mobile phones and using cellphones can contribute to the onset of brain tumors and brain cancer.

Danny: Hi! I am Danny from New York. I heard that cell phones can give you brain cancer. Is this true? Robert O'Donnell: Well, Danny, that's a really good question. When we think about a new risk factor for a potential malignancy, like high-grade brain tumor, it's important to know what the incidence of them are, and if it's increasing. The incidence of high-grade brain tumors in the United States is about 10,000 cases per year, and people think that it's staying relatively stable. There are more cases diagnosed because of MRIs being able to diagnose people better, and older people are more prone to getting brain tumors, and so the incidence in the population may increase from that. There is no definitive study, however, that's shown that cell phones cause brain tumors. The National Cancer Institute did a study and could find that there was no relationship between cell phone use and the development of brain tumors. In addition, other smaller studies have not shown that the incidence of brain tumors is related to cell phone use or the amount of cell phone use. And only one small study from Sweden showed that the people who held -- that there was more brain tumors on the side of the brain that people held their cell phone in, but that was not confirmed by other studies. More research is being done to find actual causes of brain tumors in patients, and in the meantime, we wonder why could people speculate that cell phones would be involved? Well, cell phones use radio frequency radiation, which is like a microwave, and that's not thought to cause DNA damage, like ionizing radiation that we think of from a chest x-ray or a CT, ionizing radiation does damage DNA. So the type of radiation is different, and therefore, overall, there is no conclusive evidence at this time to say that cell phones cause brain tumor.