7 ms·

"They analysed 79,241 malignant brain tumours over 21 years, finding that cases of GBM in England have increased from around 1,250 a year in 1995 to just under

• pbnjay 8y ago
  Also, in a country that grew by approximately 10 Million people in the same span.
  • graeme 8y ago
    Probably got older too - are brain tumours linked with age? If this chart is accurate, 3.5 years older: https://www.statista.com/statistics/275394/median-age-of-the-population-in-the-united-kingdom/#0 https://www.statista.com/statistics/275394/median-age-of-the... They really should have looked at rates by a given age.
    • blowski 8y ago
      And were exposed to different types of pollution, stress, and all sorts of stuff.
    • dghughes 8y ago
      Not just age but like the Baby Boomers a very large group close to the same age (20 year range?).
    • digikata 8y ago
      Yes, with an age distribution, one can ask if certain ages tend to be higher rate users of early-gen cell tech, which used much more power.
• bitL 8y ago
  Maybe it's a bit different; those who developed/didn't lose protective measures in their DNA won't be affected and those that are out of luck will be excised from the gene pool. So statistically cell phones won't cause tumors, because only adaptable would survive. And for cancer it usually is a large mix of factors that starts them, so it's difficult to filter out noise and figure out compound factors from simple health stats. BTW, exercise kills as well. There are also known cases of heavy smokers/drinkers that made it to 100.
  • consp 8y ago
    > BTW, exercise kills as well. There are also known cases of heavy smokers/drinkers that made it to 100. Outliers, not in any way related to the general trend and a bad argument in general.
    • taneq 8y ago
      When we're talking about 1-in-17,600 chances to begin with, I think outliers are relevant.
      • mfoy_ 8y ago
        I suppose you are more likely to die from exercise than from brain cancer... but I think it's also true that you're much more likely to die from lack of exercise than from exercising.
        • ams6110 8y ago
          You're going to die either way.
      • consp 8y ago
        So increase the sample size and check if they are still outliers. Or find the chance distribution (or guess it for that matter) and bootstrap the results and see if it holds.
    • coldtea 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
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• INTPenis 8y ago
  Still though, I always have and always will prefer to use my headset when talking on the mobile.
  • mediocrejoker 8y ago
    A wired headset, I presume?
    • chesimov 8y ago
      Depending on the class of Bluetooth, the signal strength is around 100 times less than a cellphone.
    • INTPenis 8y ago
      Yes but mostly because I loathe charging tiny devices more than wires. Same with headset, I prefer the sound quality. So none of these choices are made to avoid cancers.
• dharmach 8y ago
  Agree that bigger issues for health-conscious people should be smoking & overeating, and not exercising. Why not look at other health risks like cell phone or drinking a glass of wine or eating chocolate or whatever, once the bigger ones are taken care of?
  • OedipusRex 8y ago
    1. Because those still haven't been taken care of 2. Because these sensationalized risks are the ones that get coverage more than the true risks
    • chillingeffect 8y ago
      You're taking some kind of global, government level point of view. It doesn't help individuals like me and my peers who have already made the fundamental commitments to being healthy and now want to watch out for new dangers. I'm not going to wait around for the rest of the world to wake up, smell the coffee, and live a healthy lifestyle like me before accepting research on new, unknown potential dangers. There is plenty of coverage of the risks of smoking, bad diet and lack of exercise. It's in schools, it's in government materials, it's in posters, on packs of cigarettes, TED talks. There are non-profits dedicated to this causes creating propaganda. There are even national fitness and stop smoking days. No one in the world can claim, "Oh really? smoking isn't healthy? damn, I wish I'd known that!" They're making choices for themselves (modulo addiction and cognitive difficulties). I don't know how much more coverage would personally satisfy you. Calling the article about cell phone risk sensationalized is out of proportion and not just a cute exaggeration. This is simply another article in a newspaper that runs hundreds of articles a day. If it were on a billboard, if television was interrupted, if a national holiday were declared, these kinds of things might render it sensational. However, it's simply a news article on a web page between an ad for women's clothing an a breast cancer medicine ad. Maybe you think information about new health risks should be stowed further in favor of improving the health of people in general. If you feel strongly about that and you're not just trolling, I urge you to take some action and attempt to change peoples' minds about smoking, diet and exercise yourself, because you haven't changed my mind at all about the importance of researching and publishing the potential risks of cell phones.
• eli 8y ago
  You also expect the number of identified cases to increase as we improve detection methods and find tumors earlier.
  • FLUX-YOU 8y ago
    53 million is also not necessarily a population 100% seeking healthcare either, so if more people are getting access healthcare, more tumors will be found.
    • pacaro 8y ago
      While it’s not perfect, it’s a reasonable assumption in the U.K. that everyone has access to healthcare. TBH it’s a reasonable assumption in every developed country except one.
      • krageon 8y ago
        I would posit that if not everyone has access to healthcare, it's not a developed country.
      • ghufran_syed 8y ago
        Except access to a doctor is not the same as access to the key test, usually a CT in this case. In the NHS, the general practitioners are explicitly set up to be “gatekeepers” for expensive testing or referral to specialists. So it’s not hard to imagine older patients with symptoms having ct’s delayed in the past for some period of time - and some proportion of these patients, usually older patients, will die of something else before their GBM is discovered. But as people die less of other things, it could uncover more gbm’s Having worked in the UK and in the US health systems, in general in the UK you have more of a risk of something that could be done, not being done (to save the government money). Meanwhile, in the US, if you have good insurance, you are more at risk of over-testing and over-treatment (because it reduces the doctor’s perceived legal and complaint risk, and sometimes makes the doctor or hospital more money)
  • gnode 8y ago
    Is this actually likely to have a notable impact on the statistics? My understanding is that cases diagnosed later or discovered in autopsy will contribute just as much as cases diagnosed early. Assuming that such tumours aren't routinely missed in autopsies. I imagine improvements in early detection may result in a temporary increase due to the shifting phase of detection, but this wouldn't account for a doubling over twenty years.
• chillingeffect 8y ago
  I don't smoke, I'm at a healthy weight and I exercise. I've got that covered. Why would you call me obsessed if I want to know if my mobile phone is unhealthy? You're comparing "most people"'s long-term, chosen, known unhealthy habits against a new phenomenon which has less flexibility and more unknowns. It's form a of whataboutism.
• jacquesm 8y ago
  It's a lot worse than the prediction regarding the VW scandal and that continues to make headlines today. http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deaths-europe-0303 http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
  • ajross 8y ago
    The VW scandal is notable because there is human malice involved. Those people, however small their cohort may be, are going to die because some engineers cheated. That's news, just as individual crimes are news. If this was a story about brain tumors going undetected because of deliberate misdiagnosis, it would get a ton more press still.
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      There have been many people saying that cell phones can cause tumors and they have been shouted down by industry experts on many occasions. Now, I wouldn't know the truth about this either way but (1) electromagnetic radiation is something we can measure and quantify and (2) almost anything in excess has the ability to cause cancer because it interferes with certain cell mechanisms. To categorically reject something like that to me seems to be the wrong approach, reduction to absurdity would indicate that there is always going to be some effect, even if it is extremely small and the question then becomes how close to '0' is the effect. So even if this isn't a story about brain tumors going undetected because of deliberate mis-diagnosis there has been a large effort to make it seem as though there is no effect at all. And that effort was also quite deliberate.
      • michaelmrose 8y ago
        The challenge is that cell phones causing cancer is that the idea that they cause cancer has long been promoted by morons who think that they produce radiation like a nuclear reactor. The electromagnetic radiation that cell phones actually do produce is similar to say a radio or even more aptly a microwave and anyone who has ever nuked a spud knows what too much of it looks like and knows that your phones radio falls far short of what anyone would consider too much in the traditional sense. Further large scale analysis has repeatedly failed to find a correlation between the introduction of cell phones and an uptick of brain cancer. So in summary we are talking about a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by scientists and promoted by idiots if it turns out there is some novel mechanism by which it promotes brain tumors it will be a harder than average sell and it will be novel science not vindication of all the idiots who believed cell tower = plutonium.
• csomar 8y ago
  Or it helps them ignore the bigger/harder issues. How many people is stress killing? Is stress affecting your work, family? Is stress causing addiction? Is stress due to food, or workplace environment. Smoking kills. But I think people overestimate stuff. Unless you are smoking 60-100 cigs per day, I'd not be worried. When I worked in the cardiology department, those who suffered from pulmonary diseases were heavy smokers. Like 3-4 packets a day for 25 years. Now that kills. But what if stress was the cause for your smoking and drinking habit. What if stress and anger reduced your concentration and led to that traffic accident. Research focus on headlines, funding, and fame. It is another thing that is wrong with our world.
  • michaelmrose 8y ago
    Smoking kills more people that smoke like chimneys but its killed many millions that didn't. Your analysis is based on fancy not fact and it is horrifically bad. Smokers, as in all smokers not just the heaviest, have a life expectancy 10 years less than non smokers. 10s of thousands die annually just from cancers/complications from secondhand smoke. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
• Spooky23 8y ago
  I'm fascinated about casual dismissal of actual problems justified by the fact that other problems exist. I'm not panicked by this issue, but I think there's something there. I play cards with a bunch of neurosurgeons - every one of them has professional concerns about cellular and bluetooth usage, and 4/6 expressed those concerns to me individually about my AirPods.
  • walterbell 8y ago
    Wired headphones work well. Is there risk from holding a transmitting phone in the hand for an hour, or adjacent to one part of body tissue, during an extended call? How about frequencies, e.g. will 5G alter the risk to local tissue? Is WiFi lower power & risk?
    • copperx 8y ago
      It would be nice to have some guides for mitigating the risk.
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      These particular folks were concerned about the idea of radios in each ear communicating across the brain. The potential interference or other impact on brain "electonics" was an area of concern, not just cancer. I was surprised these guys were worried about it. They all use wired earbuds, which says enough for me.
  • koboll 8y ago
    Shouldn't smartphones, if they do cause cancer, cause a much larger spike in the hands or pocket area? I sure have my phone adjacent to those parts of my body a whole lot more than my head.
    • delinka 8y ago
      It’s not typically adjacent to those body parts while emitting a steady stream of radio waves. Even if it remains away from your head and near those other body parys during a call, there’s no a tube (that may channel the radiation) from the phone leading internally like the ear canal.
• anovikov 8y ago
  You are totally not right. 2000 new cases in a country of 53 million people is huge. Remember that brain cancer is nearly always fatal. Suppose it happens in the average age and the life expectancy is 80, so it cuts life expectancy by 40 years. If 2000 people per year contract it, it means 160K people overall, cutting their life expectancy by 40 years, meaning 6.4M person-years of lifetime cut. Or 1.5 months per person. 1.5 months of life is huge, this is only ~1 order of magnitude more than the smoking takes nationwide, and only a few times more than the drinking does. Probably more than any illegal drug does, taken separately. So if this study is true, it will definitely put mobile phones among top 10 preventable causes of death.
• michaelmrose 8y ago
  The population also increased by 13%. If nothing changed one would expect 1400 so its an excess mortality of 1600 that isn't borne out by the rest of the world. Something is presumably at fault but its unlikely to be cell phones and since we don't know what it is you aren't likely to be able to avoid it.
• jefurii 8y ago
  Becoming overweight is a slow problem, something that happens over the course of years. The solution is also slow: changing food behavior and keeping that up for a long period of time while resisting all kinds of temptations and pressure from a body that has gotten accustomed to a certain way of being and resists change. Humans (or at least this human) are not good at dealing with slow problems. We like to fixate on immediate, discrete threats. Also there's a global industry that profit s from people being addicted to cheaply produced unhealthy food.