Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? As usual, it's impossible to get any useful information from a sensational mainstream science article.
The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage.
Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval is reported. No mention of dose sensitivity is mentioned.
So they report some cancer association (how much? we don't know. how confident? we don't know) in a small subset of their study population (excluding female rats and all mice) at some unknown RF power and at an exposure time considerably larger than what most humans would receive.
I'm sure the science behind the study is much more rigorous than this, but wow - the reporting sucks.
- The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes
- They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor
- 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals
- SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue. In the UK/EU it's 2 W/kg.
- 18 hour cycle each day, 10 minutes off, 10 minutes on (i.e. a 9 hour 50% duty cycle)
- 90 rats per gender per group (I think 1260 total)
- 106 week study
- Litter weights were slightly lower in exposed groups (~10%), but over time there was no significant weight difference between the exposed and control groups
- For the things they studied, the exposed rats had a defect rate of a few percent compared to control values of zero. Historic control values were (in my opinion) comparable to the exposed group and it seems to be barely statistically significant. The exception seems to be heart schwannomas which were as high as 7%.
- More will be published this and next year.
Here's a fun statement:
At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls.
It's important to note that according to official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer. I've heard my own concerns about non-ionising radiation dismissed (even belittled) so many times that I've lost count. Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered. But one should understand that if this dogma was correct, there should be no link found at all.
I did a physics degree at uni, and then spent many years working in genomics. And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
After working with biologists for many years I've come to the understanding that biology is extremely complex, we have an extremely limited understanding of it, and there could be any number of as yet undiscovered effects of non-ionising radiation on cellular biology.
I would hope that as more of these studies are done (this is not the first and probably wont be the last) that we would hear less of this dogma spouted by supposedly smart people, but I doubt this will happen. It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. And the dismissive "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" people never miss an opportunity to tell you that doubting this "proven fact" makes you stupid.
"official dogma, non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer."
I doubt that you can find a scientist doing research on radiations effect on the body that dogmatically has said that "non-ionising radiation _can not_ cause cancer". I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically.
So if you "doubt" the dogma by saying "non-ionising radiation _can_ cause cancer" every scientist, and me, can go "Fk yeah, thats a working hypothesis, go prove that and bring society forward".
But if you would say that "non-ionising radiation _causes_ cancer" you are "stupid" in the way that you don't base that sentence on the current state of science and you are just making things up because you have been "working with biologists for many years" and you are a proud user of Common Sense™.
> And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it.
It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be.
If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with.
See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).
I guess a better way to say it is: Non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer the way UV, x-ray or gamma rays cause cancer. We haven't found any other way radiation can cause cancer yet.
Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the scientific method shouldn't be bandying around words like 'proof'. Science is always provisional and new evidence can always overturn a theory.
Sadly many areas of debate attract cranks in larger than usual numbers and the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is one of them. So people get rather weary of fighting the same battles again and again and tend to become a little flippant in their replies.
No, the "dogma" is just that scary cellphone RADIATION! is no more harmful than the radiation from lightbulbs, flashlights, candles etc.
And probably a couple of orders of magnitudes less so.
But hey, radiation, you know, nucular, scary.
> It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility.
This is a bit overly general. Many of us who are highly educated and traditionally intelligent battle with imposter syndrome. We're just the ones who you won't find out there acting like we know everything.
The idea that this is often the case it likely more a matter of "the squeaky wheel" than scientific fact.
I'm not saying you are a quack, but you are crying the rallying cry of quacks everywhere.
You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative.
Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed!
So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.
In a round-about-way you are hinting at the 'science is a religion' mentality. If something can't be explained by current scientific knowledge then, the people who think that way, must have the idea shot down and disregarded. It's a binary thought pattern that would probably be less common if history (and philosophy) had a greater value in society.
I think it would help a lot if they could somehow compile a list of the likelinessnes for getting cancer from a specific sort of radiation. It should also contain the radiation that we are naturally always exposed to.
Even if the values were only rough estimates I feel like this would put the real risks more into perspective.
> Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered.
Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.
The establishment demands that non-ionizing UV can be carcinogenic, but laugh if someone thinks that microwave - at various doses - could be! Why does it take so much evidence to even propose that low doses of the frequency that cook food can have adverse health effects on living humans? The fact that they're not willing to recommend bluetooth or earbuds without a mountain of evidence is another demonstration of closed mindedness. If something in nature has an even infinitesimal chance of being harmful, then you put it closer to your hands and legs - and not your eyes, face, and brain.
Medical Physicist here. The position isn't "non-ionizing radiation can't cause cancer". It's "There is no known mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer." Maybe we'll discover a mechanism one day to explain this. But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced.
We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
> But we seem to understand the processes by which cell mutations, and subsequently cancer, and produced.
We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do understand in general terms aren't understood in detail, and aren't sufficient to explain the entire process.
> But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
That seems more like a statement of subjective plausibility than a supportable statement of quantitative probability, and, moreover, in order to be relevant to the result seems also to falsely assume that it is necessary to "produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA" to alter the incidence of cancer. We already know that even when a potentially-cancer-inducing genetic mutation exists, various other non-genetic factors in the body (including qualities of the extracellular matrix around the cells which have the mutation) play significant roles in whether cancer actually develops. Its quite possible that if there is a cellphone-to-cancer link, that the mechanism doesn't involve changes in the frequency of genetic mutation at all, but affects on the body that affect the whether cancer manifests when a potentially-cancer-inducing mutation has arisen through other means.
"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA."
I really like this sentence. I wish more science commentators would talk about probability like this.
I've always been curious: I understand that h.nu from cell phone radiation isn't big enough to ionize (say) DNA, but since the molecules in our body are in thermal equilibrium, can't h.nu + kT get it done every once in a while?
[edited because using an asterisk to denote multiplication was a bad idea]
"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than..."
It was a randomized block experiment. You don't need to assume that there were no unmeasured confounders in order to make causal inferences. That assumption is only needed in cross-sectional and cohort studies.
There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions.
Another way to think about this is with an analogy: "non-lethal weapons"... but then see https://mic.com/articles/123410/nonlethal-weapons-are-much-m.... It would seem smarter to start thinking about things as "less" and "more" of something, rather than "non".
If you find some wavelength in the middle that seems to be safe, perhaps it is safe in the near term, but when put in terms of "less ionizing than we can notice" it doesn't sound like something I want to hold next to my brain for the next 15 years.
Also note, it's already known that Bluetooth and WiFi cause the blood brain barrier to become 10-100x more biologically leaky[1], letting more chemicals into your brain.
Edit: apparently, this Bluetooth / WiFi point is moot.
"I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings."
- Dr. Michael S Lauer, Director of Cardiovascular Sciences at NHLBI. Peer Review in Appendix G starting on page 36 of the study.
"This report presents partial findings from these studies. The occurrences of two tumor types in male Harlan Sprague Dawley rats exposed to RFR, malignant
gliomas in the brain and schwannomas of the heart, were considered of particular interest"
So a key question should be: how many variables was the study looking at? If they were testing 40 different things, you'd expect two 'significant' results by chance.
The discussion also mentions that pooling other studies in the program, the rate of gliomas in male controls is 11/550, rather than the 0/90 from this study. The incidence in the test group (pooling all dose levels) is 11/540, which is indistinguishable from that larger control group.
The numbers for heart schwannomas are a bit more compelling, but that's now just one variable, so the question of how many things the experiment is looking at is crucial.
From the paper a sample of 90 control rats had no cancer found while the groups (90 in each) of rats exposed to radiation had between 0 and 3 instances of cancer being found. I would have though the odds of it coming out like that by chance would be fairly high.
I also note the control rats seemed to have survived less well "At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all
2 groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR" which shows these things are a bit random and would probably not justify saying cell radiation makes you live longer.
At the moment the wsj article doesn't correctly link to the abstract so I put it in my post [1] (which also includes the full PDF link to the study [2]).
Considering there are an absolute ton of studies showing there isn't a link this is highly interesting. I'm not a telecom engineer so I don't entirely understand the methodology but part of their pilot study was to test various field strengths that do not raise the mouse or rat's body temperature (does this mean they are not using the same field strength as our towers?). They were also put into custom reverberation chambers; wouldn't that amplify or at least repeat the signal? Or is that not an issue and if so, why?
Also this section has me confused (maybe I'm reading it incorrectly?):
"At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls."
This makes it sound like the ones exposed to RF lived longer than those in the control. Am I reading that right?
Ok this is the first study that says there is a link, but let's assume for a moment that what it says is correct and it has the same effect in humans: Would the same also be true for wifi?
According to Wikipedia the average cell phone TX power is 500 mW vs 200 mW for 802.11n [0]. Cell phones usually operate at lower frequency than wifi, however wifi (at 2.4Ghz) is at the same frequency as microwave ovens.
In the study the rats were exposed for 10 minutes on - 10 minutes off for 18 hours a day (at an unknown TX power), if you work in an office you are going to be exposed continuously (apart from coffee / lunch) for 9+ hours a day, and even more if you then go home and use a wifi device.
>Where to begin? I didn’t see any sample size calculation, nor any discussion of what they expected to see. One of the reviewers did a power calculation for them (page 37) and found that based on 90 rats per group, the power was about 14%. This means that false positives are very likely. The cancer difference was only seen in females, not males. The incidence of brain cancer in the exposed groups was well within the historical range. There’s no clear dose response. Why schwannomas? Schwannomas in other locations than the heart were not significantly different. These are rats. I don’t know how this compares to real world exposure. And one more thing – the survival of male rats in the control group was relatively low, and if these tumors developed later in life, this could be the whole reason for the difference.
>Cell phones are UBIQUITOUS in the United States. If they were causing cancer, we would expect to see rates of [brain] cancer going up, right? That’s not what we’re seeing. They’ve been decreasing since the late 1980’s. At least when we talk about vaccines and autism, the rates of the latter went up as we increased the former. With cell phones, there’s an inverse relationship. What’s going on?
I suggest reading the whole post.
Personally, I am unconcerned by this single study of rats, in groups of only 90, that found barely significant correlations out of many possible correlations looked for.
Sanity check: This was 9 hours per day exposure equivalency for their entire lifetime. Consume or use almost anything at the same cycle over your lifetime and one can expect blow back.
One in 20 studies will find that, with 95% certainty, there is a link. You can easily find 19 others that found that, with 95% certainty, there is no link.
[+] [-] djmdjm|9 years ago|reply
The article states that they studied rats and mice at 9 hrs/day exposure (at what RF power?) but aren't reporting results for mice at this stage.
Of the rats (how many?), they found the "cancer association appeared in male rats" but no effect size or confidence interval is reported. No mention of dose sensitivity is mentioned.
So they report some cancer association (how much? we don't know. how confident? we don't know) in a small subset of their study population (excluding female rats and all mice) at some unknown RF power and at an exposure time considerably larger than what most humans would receive.
I'm sure the science behind the study is much more rigorous than this, but wow - the reporting sucks.
[+] [-] joshvm|9 years ago|reply
Key points:
- The rats were exposed in utero and throughout their lifetimes
- They did pilot studies to find what radiation level did not cause a body temperature rise to remove that as a confusing factor
- 900MHz CDMA and GSM signals
- SAR of 0, 1.5, 3, 6 W/kg. For comparison the FCC limit is 1.2 W/kg in 1 gram of tissue. In the UK/EU it's 2 W/kg.
- 18 hour cycle each day, 10 minutes off, 10 minutes on (i.e. a 9 hour 50% duty cycle)
- 90 rats per gender per group (I think 1260 total)
- 106 week study
- Litter weights were slightly lower in exposed groups (~10%), but over time there was no significant weight difference between the exposed and control groups
- For the things they studied, the exposed rats had a defect rate of a few percent compared to control values of zero. Historic control values were (in my opinion) comparable to the exposed group and it seems to be barely statistically significant. The exception seems to be heart schwannomas which were as high as 7%.
- More will be published this and next year.
Here's a fun statement:
At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls.
[+] [-] mcpherrinm|9 years ago|reply
Abstract: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/26/055699
Direct PDF link: http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f...
[+] [-] mnoorenberghe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cnvogel|9 years ago|reply
No link to a proper publication, though.
[+] [-] retrogradeorbit|9 years ago|reply
I did a physics degree at uni, and then spent many years working in genomics. And I've never (even before the biology work) assumed the "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" to be a true statement. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that ionisation effects are the only pathways that can cause cancer.
After working with biologists for many years I've come to the understanding that biology is extremely complex, we have an extremely limited understanding of it, and there could be any number of as yet undiscovered effects of non-ionising radiation on cellular biology.
I would hope that as more of these studies are done (this is not the first and probably wont be the last) that we would hear less of this dogma spouted by supposedly smart people, but I doubt this will happen. It doesn't matter what you do, intelligence and education often go hand in hand with ego and a feeling of infallibility. And the dismissive "non-ionising radiation can not cause cancer" people never miss an opportunity to tell you that doubting this "proven fact" makes you stupid.
[+] [-] mnsc|9 years ago|reply
I doubt that you can find a scientist doing research on radiations effect on the body that dogmatically has said that "non-ionising radiation _can not_ cause cancer". I will personally call this scientist up and lecture him/her on the merits of doing science scientifically.
So if you "doubt" the dogma by saying "non-ionising radiation _can_ cause cancer" every scientist, and me, can go "Fk yeah, thats a working hypothesis, go prove that and bring society forward".
But if you would say that "non-ionising radiation _causes_ cancer" you are "stupid" in the way that you don't base that sentence on the current state of science and you are just making things up because you have been "working with biologists for many years" and you are a proud user of Common Sense™.
[+] [-] tzs|9 years ago|reply
...and it is not justified to make that assumption, because there is reason to believe that there is another possible pathway. DNA is known to be conductive, and it is known that due to the shape of DNA in chromosomes it can act as a fractal antenna and non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation can induce currents in it.
It's also know that damage to DNA can change the conductivity of the damaged section. Some major researchers suspect that part of the mechanism cells use to detect and repair DNA damage makes use of this by looking for sections of DNA where the conductivity is not what it should be.
If this does turn out to be part of how damage is detected, then it is possible that currents induced by non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation when the DNA acts as a fractal antenna could confuse the repair mechanism causing it to fail to recognize and repair damage that would normally be found and dealt with.
Here is a submission from a little over a year ago about the fractal antenna aspect of DNA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447964
See my comment in that discussion for some more information on the possibility that this is connected to DNA repair and a link to one of the major research groups that is looking into this stuff (Jacqueline Barton's group at Caltech).
[+] [-] legulere|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|9 years ago|reply
Sadly many areas of debate attract cranks in larger than usual numbers and the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is one of them. So people get rather weary of fighting the same battles again and again and tend to become a little flippant in their replies.
[+] [-] kisstheblade|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgeek|9 years ago|reply
This is a bit overly general. Many of us who are highly educated and traditionally intelligent battle with imposter syndrome. We're just the ones who you won't find out there acting like we know everything.
The idea that this is often the case it likely more a matter of "the squeaky wheel" than scientific fact.
[+] [-] xenadu02|9 years ago|reply
You also setup a straw man. Any scientist or thoughtful person says "there isn't a known/proven" link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer and so far most evidence seems negative.
Of course there is a lot we don't know. That doesn't mean we are incapable of making any statements about anything at all. If cell phones caused a significant risk in the rise of cancer (say 1-10%) we'd have easily seen that by now. We haven't. This study didn't see it either... In fact the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than the ones not exposed!
So what we can confidently say is that if cell phone radiation causes cancer, it is an extremely minor contributor. In all likelihood it's contribution is zero, but that is also unproven and should be further studied.
[+] [-] greatnorthz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh-cx|9 years ago|reply
Even if the values were only rough estimates I feel like this would put the real risks more into perspective.
[+] [-] MicroBerto|9 years ago|reply
No matter how smart you think you may be, you simply don't know what you don't know, as you allude to later in your comment.
[+] [-] pithic|9 years ago|reply
Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.
[+] [-] snake_plissken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derptacious|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekij|9 years ago|reply
We should certainly research this area further. But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
We certainly seem to understand many of the processes by which cell mutations are produced, but that's not the same as all of them, and, perhaps more importantly, what we do understand about how cancer is produced is that there are lots of factors besides cell mutation involved, and those of them that we do understand in general terms aren't understood in detail, and aren't sufficient to explain the entire process.
> But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than the probability of an as of yet unknown process allowing microwaves to produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA.
That seems more like a statement of subjective plausibility than a supportable statement of quantitative probability, and, moreover, in order to be relevant to the result seems also to falsely assume that it is necessary to "produce changes in the chemical bonds holding together DNA" to alter the incidence of cancer. We already know that even when a potentially-cancer-inducing genetic mutation exists, various other non-genetic factors in the body (including qualities of the extracellular matrix around the cells which have the mutation) play significant roles in whether cancer actually develops. Its quite possible that if there is a cellphone-to-cancer link, that the mechanism doesn't involve changes in the frequency of genetic mutation at all, but affects on the body that affect the whether cancer manifests when a potentially-cancer-inducing mutation has arisen through other means.
[+] [-] tryitnow|9 years ago|reply
I really like this sentence. I wish more science commentators would talk about probability like this.
[+] [-] donovanr|9 years ago|reply
[edited because using an asterisk to denote multiplication was a bad idea]
[+] [-] psychometry|9 years ago|reply
"But the probability of this study having failed to control for some other variable is higher than..."
It was a randomized block experiment. You don't need to assume that there were no unmeasured confounders in order to make causal inferences. That assumption is only needed in cross-sectional and cohort studies.
[+] [-] mangeletti|9 years ago|reply
There is no such thing as "non-ionizing" radiation. There is just a continuum that ranges from "barely a chance for this to ionize a molecule" to "this will ionize something in the first nanometer". I mean, what's the point of understanding EMR as a continuum of wavelength, if we're going to create arbitrary distinctions therein and presume to know everything about those distinctions.
Another way to think about this is with an analogy: "non-lethal weapons"... but then see https://mic.com/articles/123410/nonlethal-weapons-are-much-m.... It would seem smarter to start thinking about things as "less" and "more" of something, rather than "non".
If you find some wavelength in the middle that seems to be safe, perhaps it is safe in the near term, but when put in terms of "less ionizing than we can notice" it doesn't sound like something I want to hold next to my brain for the next 15 years.
Also note, it's already known that Bluetooth and WiFi cause the blood brain barrier to become 10-100x more biologically leaky[1], letting more chemicals into your brain.
Edit: apparently, this Bluetooth / WiFi point is moot.
1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8012056
[+] [-] CorvusCrypto|9 years ago|reply
Think about it... even the 0.5 W/kg treatment is still about 40W for average human adolescent male. That's a LOT of power from just a cell phone
[+] [-] hayitsbacon|9 years ago|reply
http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f...
[+] [-] takluyver|9 years ago|reply
"This report presents partial findings from these studies. The occurrences of two tumor types in male Harlan Sprague Dawley rats exposed to RFR, malignant gliomas in the brain and schwannomas of the heart, were considered of particular interest"
So a key question should be: how many variables was the study looking at? If they were testing 40 different things, you'd expect two 'significant' results by chance.
The discussion also mentions that pooling other studies in the program, the rate of gliomas in male controls is 11/550, rather than the 0/90 from this study. The incidence in the test group (pooling all dose levels) is 11/540, which is indistinguishable from that larger control group.
The numbers for heart schwannomas are a bit more compelling, but that's now just one variable, so the question of how many things the experiment is looking at is crucial.
[+] [-] tim333|9 years ago|reply
I also note the control rats seemed to have survived less well "At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all 2 groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR" which shows these things are a bit random and would probably not justify saying cell radiation makes you live longer.
[+] [-] wmeredith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|9 years ago|reply
Considering there are an absolute ton of studies showing there isn't a link this is highly interesting. I'm not a telecom engineer so I don't entirely understand the methodology but part of their pilot study was to test various field strengths that do not raise the mouse or rat's body temperature (does this mean they are not using the same field strength as our towers?). They were also put into custom reverberation chambers; wouldn't that amplify or at least repeat the signal? Or is that not an issue and if so, why?
Also this section has me confused (maybe I'm reading it incorrectly?):
"At the end of the 2-year study, survival was lower in the control group of males than in all groups of male rats exposed to GSM-modulated RFR. Survival was also slightly lower in control females than in females exposed to 1.5 or 6 W/kg GSM-modulated RFR. In rats exposed to CDMA-modulated RFR, survival was higher in all groups of exposed males and in the 6 W/kg females compared to controls."
This makes it sound like the ones exposed to RF lived longer than those in the control. Am I reading that right?
[1] http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/26/055699
[2] http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f...
[+] [-] lucaspiller|9 years ago|reply
According to Wikipedia the average cell phone TX power is 500 mW vs 200 mW for 802.11n [0]. Cell phones usually operate at lower frequency than wifi, however wifi (at 2.4Ghz) is at the same frequency as microwave ovens.
In the study the rats were exposed for 10 minutes on - 10 minutes off for 18 hours a day (at an unknown TX power), if you work in an office you are going to be exposed continuously (apart from coffee / lunch) for 9+ hours a day, and even more if you then go home and use a wifi device.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm
[+] [-] oskansavli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mijustin|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141594
[+] [-] yc-kraln|9 years ago|reply
What about the huge, decades long study run by various governments with hundreds of thousands of people showing no association?
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|9 years ago|reply
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/images/cancer_2020/brain_othe...
and this
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/images/cancer_2020/leukemia_i...
would show at least some acceleration
the only thing that really moved the average:
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/images/cancer_2020/all_sites_...
was this, I think related to HIV:
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/images/cancer_2020/kaposi_sar...
[+] [-] tedsanders|9 years ago|reply
>Where to begin? I didn’t see any sample size calculation, nor any discussion of what they expected to see. One of the reviewers did a power calculation for them (page 37) and found that based on 90 rats per group, the power was about 14%. This means that false positives are very likely. The cancer difference was only seen in females, not males. The incidence of brain cancer in the exposed groups was well within the historical range. There’s no clear dose response. Why schwannomas? Schwannomas in other locations than the heart were not significantly different. These are rats. I don’t know how this compares to real world exposure. And one more thing – the survival of male rats in the control group was relatively low, and if these tumors developed later in life, this could be the whole reason for the difference.
>Cell phones are UBIQUITOUS in the United States. If they were causing cancer, we would expect to see rates of [brain] cancer going up, right? That’s not what we’re seeing. They’ve been decreasing since the late 1980’s. At least when we talk about vaccines and autism, the rates of the latter went up as we increased the former. With cell phones, there’s an inverse relationship. What’s going on?
I suggest reading the whole post.
Personally, I am unconcerned by this single study of rats, in groups of only 90, that found barely significant correlations out of many possible correlations looked for.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/none-of-you-can-...
[+] [-] franky303|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_sturd|9 years ago|reply
http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.f...
[+] [-] bikamonki|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fyhhvvfddhv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandre_m|9 years ago|reply
Wi-Fi wasn't mainstream back then and kids didn't have phones in their pockets all day long.
I believe we will have more accurate data in another 30 years.
[+] [-] tfm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrggrr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChartsNGraffs|9 years ago|reply
I know these are real words, but you gotta admit they sound strikingly fictitious.
[+] [-] Confusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kome|9 years ago|reply