A major government study has found a link between cellphone use and cancer.
After more than a decade of testing — and $25 million in spending — experts from the National Toxicology Program discovered that male rats exposed to the same type of radiation emitted from mobile devices, over time, experienced “low incidences” of two types of tumors in the brain and heart.
Though extensive research has found no evidence of this being the case for humans, the new findings released on Thursday night are expected to reignite the longstanding debate that cellphones do, in fact, pose a danger to one’s health.
“Given the widespread global usage of mobile communications among users of all ages, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure to [radio-frequency radiation] could have broad implications for public health,” a summary of the study reads.
During the peer-reviewed study, researchers found that male rats exposed to cellphone radiation for nine hours a day, over the span of two years, developed gliomas in the brain and schwannomas of the heart. Surprisingly, of the more than 2,500 rodents tested, only a few females were found with tumors.
But officials from the National Institutes of Health, which aided in the project, insist that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“This study in mice and rats is under review by additional experts,” the agency said in a statement. “It is important to note that previous human, observational data collected in earlier, large-scale population-based studies have found limited evidence of an increased risk for developing cancer from cellphone use.”
While a report of the findings was published late Thursday, researchers stressed that the study — one of the biggest and most comprehensive experiments ever done on the link between cellphones and cancer — was not technically finished yet.
“It is important to note that this document reviews only the findings from the brain and heart and 8 is not a complete report of all findings from the NTP’s studies,” the report says, noting that more research is expected to emerge in the next couple years.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer already classified cellphone use and other radio frequency electromagnetic fields as a possible carcinogen in 2011.
Still, peer reviewers believed there just wasn’t enough information or research out there yet to make the correlation in humans.
“I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings,” wrote Dr. Michael Lauer of the NIH.