Does Interphone Study link smartphone usage to brain tumors?

Hyderabad: A post claiming that using cell phones increases the risk of developing brain tumours by 40 per cent is being widely shared on social media.

The caption of the viral Facebook post reads, “As stated, regular cell phone use can increase the risk of getting a brain tumour by 40 per cent. This was demonstrated in the INTERPHONE study, which was the largest study (5,117 brain tumour cases) on cell phones and brain tumours with scientists from 13 countries. (sic)”

Brain tumours are among the leading causes of death. It is an abnormal growth of tissue in the brain and can seriously harm the function of the brain, and eventually the entire body.

Can smartphones really lead to brain tumours? Let’s find out.

Fact Check

To begin with, NewsMeter tried to check the veracity of the study mentioned in the viral claim. We ran a keyword search and found the ‘Interphone Study’. According to the claim, this study concluded that 'regular cell phone use can increase your risk of getting a brain tumour by 40%.'

An analysis done on the study inferred that “Interphone is an impressively large study with multiple indices of exposure. However, it has some methodological deficits, largely inevitable in recall-based case-control studies, which limit the interpretation of its findings. Such evidence, combined with the results of biological and animal studies, other epidemiologic studies, and brain tumour incidence trends, suggest that within the first 10-15 years after first mobile phone use, there is unlikely to be a material increase in the risk of adult brain tumours resulting from mobile phone use. At present, there are no data on the risk of childhood tumours.”

They also concluded that “The possibility of a small or a longer-term effect thus cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, although one cannot be certain, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use causes brain tumours.”

Hence the ‘Interphone Study’ doesn’t provide any conclusive result that using mobiles can increase the risk of brain tumours by 40 per cent.

According to a Danish cohort study, “Cell phone use, even for more than 13 years, was not linked with an increased risk of brain tumours, salivary gland tumours, or cancer overall, nor was there a link with any brain tumour subtypes or with tumours in any location within the brain.”

Also, according to a Million Women Study, “A large prospective (forward-looking) study of nearly 800,000 women in the UK examined the risk of developing brain tumours over an average of about 14 years in relation to self-reported cell phone use. This study found no link between cell phone use and the risk of brain tumours overall or of several common brain tumour subtypes.” There are limits as to how well this study might apply to people using cell phones today, they added.

Lastly, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a part of the World Health Organisation, also stated in a 2011 report that there is no conclusive evidence that mobiles or cell phones are carcinogenic (cancerous) for humans.

It is evident that all aforementioned studies lack complete evidence and have their own limitations. However, there is no conclusive proof that cell phones can increase or indirectly cause cancer or brain tumours.

Hence, the claim is false.