Scaremongering About Cell Phones
Once again sensation click-bait headlines declare that a new study confirms that cell phones cause cancer, when the truth is nothing of the sort. This fearmongering journalism fails to actually inform readers, and instead tries to alarm them with misinformation.
Most of the headlines are some version of: “SHOCK STUDY: CELLPHONES CAN CAUSE CANCER,” in all caps to make sure you understand that you should be alarmed. None of the mainstream reporting I saw looked passed the press release.
Let’s take a look at the actual study: Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation.
The first thing to note as that this is a review article. It does not present any new data. It is not an experiment or observational study. It’s not even a meta-analysis. It is just a group of researchers looking at the literature and proclaiming that it confirms what they already believed.
Review articles serve a legitimate purpose in science. They are a primary way that researchers communicate with each other and express their opinion. But they should not be presented as if they are new data, or as if they confirm one side in a debate. They can be abused, however, in a process called citation bias – packing the literature with reviews that support your side to make it seem like it is more robust than it actually is.
It also needs to be clear that this review does not look at studies which examine whether or not there is an actual increase in brain cancer or other illness associated with cell phone use. While there are still minority dissenters, there is a growing consensus among scientists that cell phone use does not cause brain cancer. Most reassuring is that, as cell phone use has skyrocketed over the last 20 years, the incidence of brain cancer has not budged.
The lead author of the current review (to avoid confusion it really shouldn’t be called a “study”), Igor Yakymenko, has published several articles arguing that low intensity radio-frequency radiation (RFR) can increase oxidative stress in tissues and this is a possible mechanism of increased disease risk. In his current review he argues that the published evidence supports this position.
While the evidence may support the notion that RFR can increase markers of oxidative activity in tissue, it does not establish that this increase is biologically important and can actually lead to specific diseases. It also does not establish that cell phone use causes any harm by this mechanism.
At this point Yakymenko’s hypothesis is still speculative, and there is no evidence to make claims for actual health effects. There is no problem with him publishing a review of the data and arguing for his hypothesis, but it is dubious behavior to send out a sensational press release declaring victory in a scientific debate because of your own review, and then linking your claims to scary health concerns.
The media, as I have noted, happily obliged Yakymenko by presented the press release without first consulting independent experts or conducting anything resembling actual journalism.
Your credibility is considerably diminished when you published gobbledygook like this: “None of the mainstream reporting I saw looked passed the press release.” It starts with a capital letter and ends with a period, but it’s not a sentence!
Actually it has a subject, “I”, and a verb, “saw”, so therefore it is a legitimate sentence, however strange the sentence structure may be.
Thanks again Steven for dispelling some of the mythology. Congratulations on your new rogue on the podcast. I like her a lot too. Can’t wait to hear her each week along with the rest of you guys…
“The first thing to note as that this is a review article. It does not present any new data.”
Aren’t systematic reviews MORE reliable than some single new study? Don’t reviews establish the consensus by evaluating lots of studies?
But speaking of new rogues, instead of making sure to have a young chick on the show, I wish you had more diversity of thought, with someone who’d play devil’s advocate and raise questions like the one above, and call you out on double-standards and credulity about certain things. Someone who’d ask whether a “giant robot” operated by a driver sitting inside it is really a robot or a glorified tank or heavy equipment, and what are the chances that these million-dollar machines will seriously punch each other with a driver inside?
And if you’re angry with anti-vaxxers for diminishing autistic people, are you furious with anti-smokingers for diminishing cancer patients?
No, reviews are used to express an opinion are therefore more open to citation bias because no new data is introduced. If a new study is done properly with the necessary controls and procedures then the new data will dictate the conclusion rather than the authors view point dictating the conclusion through selective reading. A consensus is not determined by a review, instead it’s determined either by polling scientist, scientific bodies or by reviewing all of the credible literative on a particular research topic and not just the literature that confirms the authors opinion.
It depends on the quality of the articles being reviewed, the ability/integrity of the person reviewing the literature and -as pointed out above – whether there is citation bias.
Can anyone actually access the paywalled paper? I’ve tried from two different biomedical departments and neither has a subscription. Looking only at the abstract, I have big problems with the assumed correlation between oxidative stress and cancer. I also wonder why people are dignifying this with the title of a “meta-review”. Cochrane studies are meta-reviews: they look at hundreds of papers, sanity-check methods, reanalyze the data and pool it together to get new, significant information. This is just a review where the authors pick 100 papers and count how many have conclusions that support “oxidative effects of rf radiation”. This seems less than useful.
According to the Australian Cancer council web site, one person is diagnosed with brain cancer every 8 hours and approx 45% of those being under 18 years of age. That was not the same 20 years ago.
Brain tumors/brain cancer has increased exponentially in the last few years and sadly much more prevalent in the young. Although a definitive cause can not be proven at this stage one has to look at what has change in this time.
I believe it is remiss to dismiss WiFi and mobile phones as mare scaremongering when the possibility is very high that they are involved. Just look at tobacco and asbestos.
Profit before people is a common factor in our own Governments evaluation of these issues, where an open platform for debate would help bring real facts to light.
I mean an honest debate and not the stacked ones that we are exposed to that are sold to us as unbiased.
If radiation from mobile phones and wifi caused cancers we’d see cancers across all age groups, across all segments of society. we’d be swimming in an epidemic of cancer.
Clearly this isn’t case