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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

Cellphone use? Colon position is close to pocket height, where our cellphones tend to stay while not charging or being actively manipulated. Someone should try to correlate tumor starting location with handedness. If it tends to start the same side the dominant hand is, that would be a smoking gun.

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Everyone here is complaining about the nature of the proposed natural experiment and I’m just here thinking “where are the pockets on OP’s clothes?”

Phones are stored primarily in front pockets that are nowhere near the colon in terms of biology (almost everyone has relatively dense meaty quads and femurs between the thigh and colon) or the inverse square law.

To be fair, I use my hoodie pockets pretty often.

To be fair, that's even further away from the colon...

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

No, the ascending and descending parts are exactly where my hoodie pockets are.

The large intestine is fairly deep in the abdomen, there’s a lot of tissue and mass between a hoodie pocket and the colon.

One side of it will be shielded by approximately double the mass, when compared to the one closer to the pocket where the phone is usually stored.

> relatively dense meaty quads and femurs between the thigh and colon

While it in now way changes the conclusion, quads are on the front of the leg; many people carry it in their back pocket.

People sit on their phones?

If that were the case, you wouldn’t see 10-14 year old see a 500% increase and the increase would be closely correlated with when they got the phone, etc.

Also, the article seems to suggest that the absolute incident rate isn’t high - which could mean that we are likely getting better at detection rather than increase in underlying prevalence.

After my first colon cancer, I read all I could find about cell phones and cancer, and did not find anything substantial. The most interesting was an indication that perhaps the radiation could impair the immune system's ability to fight cancer. But I think that stress of modern life would affect the immune system more.

I would be more worried about the increase of chemicals in the environment, such as PFAS and nanoplastics.

I would be more worried about the quantity of $7 a bag Doritos-derived chips and blue Mt Dew they are eating.

Our environment has been riddled PFAs for generations.

Well it's supposedly all non-ionizing radiation, which can't cause DNA damage and cancer links are controversial at best, but I agree it should be looked at statistically. Here are some other conjecturable variables:

- Novel chemicals in the environment?

- Composting bins now in proximity to food?

- Decline in vax rates? (pathogen-cancer route, immune response spillover route)

- Organic pesticides on organic vegetables?

With the 10-19 year-old groups, you're looking at very low overall numbers, so a 400% increase might mean something like from 10 to 50 cases a year in the US. Still, shedding light on this anomaly might uncover a major causal pathway in the older cohorts.

What about all the adults that got phones between 2000-2015 and use them since then to today?

I'd expect a 50 year old person that uses a phone for the past 25 years to be full of holes if cellphone usage has any effect on kids using them for few years. Especially since older phones were radiating much more energy.

Not necessarily, assume that cellular radio emissions effects on cells is like really a mild form of radiotherapy. It would mostly impact some cells undergoing mitosis while having almost no impact on mature slowly dividing cells.

I am not saying that cellular radio are harmful but it's cumulative impact on dividing cells should be tested to exclude that possibility.

Cells are always being replaced, you replace almost every cell in your body each decade.

Not true for neurons, some heart cells, skeletal muscle cells (muscle fibers), red blood, etc

That's a lot of indispensable cells that do not reproduce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_muscle#Skeletal_muscl...

Indeed, that's why I said almost - but it's true for the squishy parts of the abdomen we're talking about.

The human digestive tract is constantly creating new cells, it's a lot like skin in that sense. I doubt teens have much significantly more mitosis in their butts compared to adults.

> assume that cellular radio emissions effects on cells is like really a mild form of radiotherapy

Except it’s not. It’s thermal. The heat from your cell phone is more carcinogenic than its EM emissions.

I saw a documentary where a startup in California was doing quite well selling faraday cage underwear. I was really scratching my head and wondering if they were just grifting or if it was addressing a serious issue. These were highly refined products.

Don’t faraday cages need to be grounded to function properly?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/321168/effective...

Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation so this shouldn't be possible from a first-principles physics standpoint.

Just because it doesn't ionize atoms doesn't mean it can't have biological effects.

Some bacteria secrete small iron oxide crystals and are able to use those to sense magnetic fields[1]. Our guts are full of bacteria. Wonder if a nearby RF emitter can cause some of them to run amok. They surely tested the effects of cellphones in human tissues, but I doubt the same was done to bacterial cells.

[1]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotactic_bacteria

> bacteria secrete small iron oxide crystals and are able to use those to sense magnetic fields

There is preliminary evidence "that MTB in the gut are associated with grey matter volume in magnetite-rich brain regions related to orientation and navigation" [1].

> Wonder if a nearby RF emitter can cause some of them to run amok

This was explored (and dismissed) in the early noughties [2], when cell-phones-cause-cancer was enjoying a halcyon. (I think it was radiation from CRTs before that. Probably non-organic vegetables today.)

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00343-021-0495-1

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15376948/

All electromagnetic radiation that encounters some conductive material induces (tiny) currents. Cells are full of conductive materials.

"Low-frequency electric fields influence the human body just as they influence any other material made up of charged particles"

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/rad...

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