Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com