Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer? A New WHO-Commissioned Review Says No

The review found no link between mobile phone use and any head or neck cancer — no matter how much time you clock on your device!

There is no connection between mobile phone use and brain cancer — regardless of how much time you spend on your device — according to a new review commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The systematic review, published in Environment International, found that while the use of mobile phones and other wireless technologies have massively increased in the last two decades, there has been no rise in the incidence of brain or other head and neck cancers.

The review not only found no concrete link between cellphone use and brain cancer, but it also found no link with prolonged (a decade or more) cellphone use or amount (number of calls made or time spent on the device) of cellphone use.

The study also found no increased risks of either brain cancer or leukemia in kids who were exposed to phone towers, radio transmitters or TV transmitters.

According to Ken Karipidis, an associate professor with Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency’s (ARPANSA) who led the review, it is the “most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the evidence to date.”

Karipidis and the other experts considered over 5,000 studies published between 1994 and 2022, ultimately including 63 in its final analysis, and focused on brain cancer and other cancers of the central nervous system — including glioma, meningioma, acoustic neuroma, pituitary tumours and more.

The review pushed back on the 2013 decision of the WHO’s cancer agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to classify exposure to radio waves as possibly carcinogenic — which, despite the worry it drummed up, “doesn’t mean all that much," Karipidis told The Guardian.

It is one of the IARC’s several classifications of cancer risk, which range from “definite” carcinogens like smoking tobacco to “possible,” where radio waves reside alongside substances like aloe vera.

In a statement, Karipidis said the IARC’s decision “was largely based on limited evidence from human observational studies” — not to mention, lots more relevant studies have emerged in the 11 years since.

The newly published review is “based on a much larger dataset compared to that examined by the IARC, that also includes more recent and more comprehensive studies, so we can be more confident that exposure to radio waves from wireless technology is not a human health hazard,” Karipidis said in a statement.

He also stated that much early research on whether radio waves are carcinogenic relied on comparing the responses of people with brain cancer to those without — which can be “somewhat biased,” he told The Washington Post.

An individual with a brain tumor, he said, “wants to know why they’ve got the brain tumor and tends to overreport their exposure,” while more comprehensive cohort studies have not shown those sort of associations.”

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With the new review turning the IARC’s classification on its head, Karipidis told The Guardian that he is “quite confident with" the review's conclusion.

“And what makes us quite confident is … even though mobile phone use has skyrocketed, brain tumor rates have remained stable,” he added.

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