Mobile phone use not linked to eye cancer
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German investigators have reversed their previous finding that the use of mobile phones appears to be associated with an increased risk of developing melanoma of the eye (uveal melanoma); new results indicate that the association does not exist.
“We recently reported an increased risk of uveal melanoma for subjects who reported frequent use of mobile phones at work,” Dr. Andreas Stang, of Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, and colleagues note in the current Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
“However, this study suffered from incomplete exposure assessment and relatively low statistical power due to low exposure prevalence, which triggered some discussion about the validity of these findings,” they add.
To investigate further, the team conducted a “case-control” study that included 459 patients with melanoma of the eye and 1,194 control subjects. Control subjects were drawn from the general population, from ophthalmology clinics, and from siblings of the patients.
The investigators grouped study participants according to amount of time spent on the phone, as never users, sporadic users and regular users.
The results showed no statistically significant association between mobile phone use of up to about 10 years and risk of melanoma of the eye. There was also no trend found for surrogate measures of cumulative dose.
“The null result of this study is inconsistent with the result of our initial study, which reported an increased risk of uveal melanoma among subjects who were exposed in the workplace to either mobile phones or radio sets,” Stang and colleagues conclude.
“It may be that case patients differed from control subjects in ways that were not controlled in the analysis, given that they had this unusual high-intensity exposure to mobile phones and radio sets in an era when such exposures were rare.”
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, January 21, 2009.
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