Owners of older mobile telephones are at substantially greater risk of contracting a brain tumor, a Swedish study published in the current issue of the European Journal of Cancer Preventionreveals.
Researchers spent four years studying 1,617 patients with brain tumors in central Sweden in what they said was the largest study so far into first-generation mobile phones and cancer risk. The results were compared with a healthy control group.
The result showed that users of first-generation phones were from 1.3 to 3.5 times greater at risk of developing cancer than those who did not use those phones.
"It is clear that these users should exercise caution," Mr Kjell Hansson Mild of the Swedish National Instititue for Working Life, co-author of the study, said.
Mr Hansson Mild said that the risk of cancer was not as clearly established for users of GSM phones, the most-widely used type of mobile phone today.
But he also pointed out that GSM phones had not yet been in circulation for many years, and no one in the study had been using such a phone for more than a decade.
AFP