High exposure to radio frequency radiation associated with cancer in male rats | Hacker News Reader

High exposure to radio frequency radiation associated with cancer in male rats

factor.niehs.nih.gov

82 pointsswebs57 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355680

I’ve been following these studies for awhile. The biggest red flag for me is that the effect is constrained to male rates. This is exactly the sort of result you expect to see when not sufficiently controlling for multiple statistical analyses (i.e., unintentional p-hacking). I suspect a Bayesian approach with an appropriate prior on sex-sensitive biological cancer effects would not yield statistically significant results.

Some other broad concerns are outlined here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/that-rat-cellp...

Or that the rats, who were exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the ones that developed cancer attributable to the RF, but mice, who were exposed to higher levels of RF, did not show a statistically significant increase.

clinical and research studies typically use male rats to control for the effects of hormonal changes etc.

They used female rats as well in this study. That's not what happened here.

Also, exposed rats happen to live longer -> rats die of old-age diseases, particularly cancer.

Here we go again.

"The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice."

Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna.

They basically cooked(because RF does cause heating) the mice alive for two years, and they developed cancer.

Interesting that the rats, who appear to have been exposed to lower amounts of RF, were the group identified as developing cancer.

Would be nice if articles like this actually linked to the study.

>1.5w/kg, is far below what a

don't you mean "far above"?

Yes...will fix

>> Even the lowest amount cited, 1.5w/kg, is far above what a human would receive standing directly in front of a cell tower transmitting antenna.

It would be the one in peoples pockets they need to worry about. Sure the power is really low, but the range is under an inch.

The original Radarange (microwave) cooked at either 500 or 800 watts, the upper number of which is the upper range in the study (10W/kg), where a human might weigh 80kg, = 800 watts.

My late uncle was in the US Army in Desert Storm. During that period, it was always hot, even at night, and the most comfortable place to sleep at night was on top of the humvee's hood.

But one night the radar got left on overnight, and he literally got cooked from the inside out (when it's 100 degrees outside, it's hard to pick up on that sort of thing).

He had health problems for the remainder of his life and died young (never found out how, but cancer would be my first guess). I really liked him.

Radar would be quite a lot of RF radiation!

I don’t know anything about the system in question but if it was mounted on a humvee it would have to be low power to avoid cooking people in the beam. Plus there will be so many reflections in an urban environment and the ranges are so short that you’d likely do better with a low power system. Maybe on the order of 5-25 watts.

That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage.

If you're literally sleeping on the radar antenna you're in the near field of the antenna. Meaning, the antenna doesn't work at all like it was designed and you can get "strange" couplings, e.g. very high power density in a few spots on the body, and almost no power coupled to other parts.

>That said, sinking say 10W of heat into your organs overnight is going to do serious damage.

Is it? Electric heating pads and electric blankets are certainly a thing, and they're around 10W (the one I have says 50W).

I had a 5W CB radio a few years ago and bought one of those 'through the windshield' antennas. It basically operates by sticking two panels of tuned copper plates on each side of the glass and they just pass the RF energy between them.

I made the mistake of trying to see if I could feel the 5 watts of RF energy coming from the radio side of the plate. I stuck the panel to my palm, keyed the mic, and instantly felt a searing, stabbing pain in my hand. It felt like a hot nail was jammed into the meat of my palm and was very surprisingly painful.

As blattimwind said above, the distribution of RF energy in the body is going to be very unpredictable at that distance and you could have hot spots deep in the tissue that are not innervated. If you got a hot spot anywhere near what I experienced with that CB antenna I'm absolutely confident there would be tissue damage.

It’s pretty unusual that he would have survived the incident if he was cooked by microwave radiation. I’ve known this sort of thing to happen in ship repair accidents and they usually die within days.

Whenever this topic comes up, there are inevitably scores of commenters shitting on the ‘scientifically ignorant’ because cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation and therefore are not carcinogenic.

To me the important outcome of this study is to demonstrate that there is a spectrum (har har) of dosage and that there is now a fleck of evidence that non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer at higher levels.

The fact that humans are 50-100x the body mass of a rat is important obviously, but if most of the RF is being absorbed by the first few inches of brain matter by your ear maybe the effective difference isn’t so great.

Body mass isn't the only difference between humans and male rats. Humans are more different from male rats than female rats are, and these studies didn't produce evidence that RF causes cancer in female rats. It didn't produce this evidence in male or female mice either. They also only say that the evidence is clear for heart tissue.

Human brains aren't made of male rat heart tissue, so we should be safe even if this conclusion is valid. More importantly, hundreds of millions of people have been using cell phones for decades now and no one has noticed a spike of brain cancer near the ears.

The most interesting part of this to me is that, even though this evidence is extremely weak, it is actually stronger than the evidence from animal studies that tobacco smoke can cause lung cancer. It is nearly impossible to devise a study in which breathing in the smoke increases lung cancer rates.

Actually it took researchers half a century to figure out a way despite easily causing lung cancer with radioactive dust, etc. Eventually they discovered you need to expose a special strain of mice starting within hours of birth, and then simulate quitting smoking by stopping the exposure as adults. It is actually the healing from the smoke-induced damage that seems to cause cancer, which makes sense if you believe cancer is a disease caused by too many cell divisions.

>"Strain A mice were exposed first to a comparatively high concentration of ETS, generated from the sidestream (89%) and mainstream (11%) smoke from burning Kentucky 1R4F cigarettes, as described before in detail [9]. After a 5-month exposure, the animals were allowed to recover in air for another 4 months before evaluation of the lung tumor response. The same protocol was eventually adopted by three other laboratories [10–12]. [...] The flat dose-response suggests that tobacco smoke is a comparatively weak carcinogen. A previous study in which a dose-response was conducted in one single experiment came to the same conclusion [13]. It may to some extent explain why most inhalation studies done with tobacco smoke in mice failed to give a positive tumor response [14, 15]. The fact that ‘‘only’’ 10% to 25% of all smokers develop lung cancer [16] might also be construed to indicate that tobacco smoke is not a very potent carcinogen in man." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916

>"In spite of the dominant role of cigarette smoke (CS) in the epidemiology of lung tumors, tumors at other sites, and other chronic degenerative diseases [1, 2], it is very difficult to reproduce the noxious effects of this complex mixture in animal models. [...] During the last decade, we developed a novel murine model that convincingly reproduces the carcinogenicity of MCS [6] and its modulation under conditions mimicking interventions either in current smokers and/or ex-smokers. [...] Our model involves exposure of mice for 4 months, starting at birth, followed by a period of 3-4 months in filtered air in order to give enough time for the growth of histopathological lesions." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344

"He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde."

Some well known Dutch soccer pro long ago observed that 'every downside has its upside', this seems to be one of those.

Such a shame that hormesis is very visible in rats, yet nothing happens to humans.

Hormesis has been observed in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Ionizing_radiation

There is some indication that RF can alter cellular function.

Function of Voltage Gated Calcium channels [0] (in ~human~ cells) has been shown to be altered by incident RF [1][2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage-gated_calcium_channel

[1] https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/...

[2] http://www.eurekaselect.com/141390

[edit] Got information wrong, not human cells, animal cells. [/edit]

"RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice."

So, they put them in a microwave.

That's an immense amount of RF. The cancer is likely happening because they are literally being slow-cooked.

> "RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats, and 2.5 to 10 watts per kilogram in mice.". So, they put them in a microwave.

Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Microwave ovens often range from 600w to 1200w. So no, that's not anything close to that. Not to mention the animals would die quite quickly and there would be no experiment to be done.

It's like a human in a microwave. 80 kg human * 10 W/kg = 800 watts.

Some napkin math:

It looks like mouse/rat weight varies widely, I'm going to be lazy and just pick 400g and from what I can tell, that also means about 400cm^2 body volume. Ultimately all that matters is the density though, which is unsurprisingly pretty close to water, close enough I'm not going to bother with it.

microwave power density = 1200W * 0.75 (efficiency estimate) / 22500cm^3 (interior volume) = 0.04W/cm^3

So in this experiment we have 1.5w to 10w * 0.4kg = 0.6W to 4W

In a 1200W microwave: 400cm^2 * 0.04W = 16W

In an 600W microwave: 8W (tho a 600W microwave is probably smaller so this may be low)

So a microwave would be 2-4 times more radiation than what they were exposed to in this experiment. Likely my power-to-rat-delivery estimate is a bit low for the microwave since I didn't take into account any sort of chamber resonance / reflection in the microwave enclosure, just it's baseline power density. Though, it would still get no where near dumping all it's power into something the size of a rat.

You're assuming that the interior of the microwave behaves like an uniform field, so if you occupy 50 % of the volume, only 50 % of the power can be coupled to that object. This is not the case. There are some (big) losses in how power is coupled to the object in the microwave, but it's not 98 %. Also note that the power is coupled through the surface, so for power transfer it's mostly important that you have (1) big surface (2) surface depth exceeding penetration depth. The exact coupling is "dirty" (near field), so it doesn't just depend on surface area, but also surface structure, precise alignment etc.

E.g. a ball of mashed potatoes takes longer to heat up than a ring/donut-shaped arrangement of the same mashed potatoes.

So your math is telling me that a mice (10w/kg in the experiment) would survive 25 days in a 600w microwave oven at full power?

Because they survived in the experiment.

My 600w microwave oven cooks eggs in 2 minutes. Pretty sure a mice wouldn't last an hour inside it even at 1/4 power.

> In 2011, the Wireless Power Consortium began to extend the Qi specification to medium power. The low-power specification delivers up to 5 W (typically used to charge mobile devices), and the medium-power specification will deliver up to 120 W (typically used to power displays and laptops). In 2015, WPC demonstrated a high-power specification that will deliver up to 1 kW, allowing the powering of kitchen utensils among other high-power utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28standard%29

And wireless chargers for cars are on the way.

Qi doesn't use rf or microwave to transmit power. Inductive coupling is not at all the same as what was studied afaik.

So, I'm not saying they shouldn't be investigating this, but widespread cell phone usage has been here for a while now. Can't we just look at the actual rate of death from brain cancer (death rates not diagnosis rates since this reduces the bias from changes in how often it is detected), and see if there's been an increase in brain cancer? From what I've found, there has not. The frequency of people holding the cell phone right next to their head while talking on it has actually been going down in recent years, as texting and other ways of using the phone have replaced audio phone calls. If this was going to be a problem, it seems like we would have seen it by now?

Another area to investigate would be fertility rates -- the blog headline summarizing the research findings would presumably say "Why are millennials having fewer children? Because they keep their cell phones in their pockets on the subway" regardless of the study results.

There are too many other variables for that to be useful. For example, in the past decade we've almost completely phased out CRT displays, which were outputting measurable amounts of ionizing radiation.

Devra Davis, an epedemiological cancer researcher[1], writes how it often takes decades for the same carcinogens to actually cause tumor growth in humans while it can take just years (or even much shorter) in mice.

I dont know exacty when cell phone usage became widespread in the developed world, but if it was the 90s to mid 2000s we may still need another decade to start seeing the possible effects.

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-War-Cancer/dp/04650156...

No, outside of a laboratory everything influences such signals. First of all, changing medical practice changes how often and in which stages cancer is detected and treated. Dealing with that, you have then to deal with changing fashions (less smoking more sushi), and so on. Dealing with all of these is of course error prone and in the end, you can only see very strong effects in real life.

My father recently died from a brain cancer. It was a tumor originally so he had surgery to get the 6cm tumor removed. After the removal of the tumor it immediately started to grow back and was diagnosed stage 4. When he asked the surgeon how did he get cancer. The surgeon replied with "Sometimes we have bad luck". Within a Month the cancer grew back to the original 6cm. He decided to try chemotherapy but after doing it once he decided to not go through that again. He seemed fine for the next 3 months, coherent eating then he deteriorated very quickly and died exactly within the timeframe he was told.

Cancer does not run on either side of my parents families. During the last few years up until he passed, he used to go hours everyday wearing wireless headphones, falling asleep with them on, watching tv, listening to music.

That is the only thing that I can think of that could possibly make any remote sense. I refuse to believe "bad luck" is the only reason.

"Luck" just means we don't have enough information to say why so you use a statistical model instead. In the same way we treat winning a coin flip as due to luck but you could devise a situation where you know exactly what will happen given all the right parameters are known. In the past people called the same thing "god's will".

That said, it doesn't mean the cancer needed to be heavily influenced by any conscious choice/behavior made by your father.

>"Can't we just look at the actual rate of death from brain cancer (death rates not diagnosis rates since this reduces the bias from changes in how often it is detected), and see if there's been an increase in brain cancer?"

Just seeing an increase could be due to anything, the prediction "if cell phones could cause cancer then there would be an increase" is too vague.

Instead someone needs to come up with a mathematical model that predicts a precise pattern of cancer due to a precise exposure schedule. Then that model would need to be verified later on new data. That type of "testing a precise prediction against real world observational data" study is actually the gold standard of science (eg, astronomy). You need to do the hard work of coming up with the precise model though, and people attracted to medicine generally dont like math.

I should note in response to several good replies here, that since cell phone usage varies by country and demographic, it seems that if it caused a (significant) increase in brain cancer (the organ most exposed to cell phone related radiation), it would show up in a distinctive pattern. Japan had widespread cell phone usage before the U.S.A., and in the US the upper class had widespread cell phone usage before the working class. If it were a significant factor that ought to stand out from the background noise of other possible carcinogens.

AFAIK (I'm not a specialist by any means) brain cancer has a long (years) latency time. I've heard that that is why it took a lot of time to diagnosis Hiroshima and Nagashaky survivors. If that is true, we are still inside the latency period.

A rat generates 2W per hour (total daily energy budget is 172kJ for a rat [1]).

The highest level of radio-frequency-radiation was 3W per hour [2].

That seems like a significant extra load on their system, although obviously depends on cage temperature and ability to regulate internal temperature.

[1] https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/eph88...

[2] From article: "The RFR exposure was intermittent, 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off, totaling about nine hours each day. RFR levels ranged from 1.5 to 6 watts per kilogram in rats".

He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde.

Looking at the source data in the report for male rate survival probability (https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/htdocs/lt_rpts/tr595_508.pdf, page 66), the increase in survival appears to be dose-dependent. In other words, the higher the dose of radiation, the better the survival rate after 76 weeks. This is what I'd expect to see for a real effect as opposed to an artifact.

The lack of error bars makes it hard to give significance to the finding, though.

The female group (second graph on page) show no clear difference.

Looking at the table on the preceding page, the main effect appears to be reduction of moribund state. There might be multiple explanations here. For example, an animal that can't move can't feed itself properly and so will succumb to malnutrition sooner.

I'm just skimming so I might have missed a better link, but this seems to be the biorxiv of the actual study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/01/055699

When I was in academia, I was involved in experiments consisting in the exposure of flies (drosophila melanogaster) to 900 MHz controlled electromagnetic fields.

I participated to the design of the exposure chamber, essentially a bi-planar transmission line, with a peak electric field near 220 V/m.

We were able to find evidence of an effect only after 7 days of continuous exposure to the field.

The effect was an up-regulation of the genes encoding for a stress-response protein (Hsp70, aka heat-shock protein).

We tried also exposure to pulsed high intensity magnetic field (~1T for 2 usec) for 3 hours, 1 pulse per second. Same effect.

My opinion is that, as long as fields are at low intensity and for short periods, we can consider such exposures as moderately safe

Seemingly missing from the article, but present in the paper: the RF was at 900 MHz and 1900 MHz. Both frequencies are in the range in which water absorbs RF. Checks with "these scientists slow-cooked the mice with radio waves."

Both frequencies are also exactly the same used by cell phones and—more importantly—high power cell phone towers.

>> He also noted the unexpected finding of longer lifespans among the exposed male rats. “This may be explained by an observed decrease in chronic kidney problems that are often the cause of death in older rats,” said Wyde.

Excuse me, what? Their exposure to RFR prevented kidney problems? Won't anyone follow up on that?

Want to read some scary stuff, checkout how 5G "topology" works. Essentially everything (including living things) become antenna for the network. It is quiet different tech than 3 and 4G.

You're not an antenna, you're a reflector.

Just like you are a reflector for RFR at much greater power levels and much higher frequencies (light), yet only the highest energy ones(UV and above) cause cancer, and that is because they are of a sufficiently high energy that they are able to knock electrons away from atoms, turning them into ions(ionizing radiation).

Can you please provide a source to this?

Why would it be surprising when proteins offer life form and function. If Radio frequency radiation can alter form of a protein then we might develop cancer?

You only have to alter few proteins, so the duplication of cell become errrorneous and all subsequent cells are affected.

You can prove this in testube, simply bombard a protein with Radio waves.

Edit: i don't understand the downvotes, please educate.

that's why you should ground yourself for good time on daily bases many youtube videos can explain how to ground your office space even your bed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPqh4DNfwg

Don't forget to wrap your blanket in tinfoil.

You're thinking too small. Why not have a conductive blanket.

http://www.lessemf.com/bedding.html

Or just paint your walls and make your home a Faraday's cage?

http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html

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