| You appear to have your facts wrong. From the study[1]: > Eligible cases were all patients with a glioma or meningioma of the brain diagnosed in the study regions during study periods of 2–4 years between 2000 and 2004. So participants in the study lasted between 2 and 4 years. Since elevated rates of cancer were only found in the group with the highest usage[2], this means people with >=1640 hours of talk time, which means between 68 and 34 hours per month. Not two hours per month. And this is easy to sanity check; here's the study again: > Corresponding values for [median lifetime cumulative call time] glioma controls were 100 h lifetime, 2.5 h/month and about 2000 calls. So the median user used about 2.5 hours per month, not the heavy user. Now, let's hear them out a bit more: > Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term
heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation. It's also worth noting that you're using the word double somewhat duplicitously. Yes, the study found double the glioma rate in very heavy users (as discussed, much more than two hours per month), but it also found that the rest of cellphone users are less likely to get cancer than average. If we take your causal analysis seriously, then we should also take this seriously: low to moderate cell phone usage grants instant partial immunity to brain cancer. So, because the cancer rate in the study population excluding the highest usage group was .7 of what it is in the normal population, a rate of 1.4 times the normal population among heavy users is double the rate seen in the rest of the study population. [1]:http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/ije/press_release...
[2]:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010... edited to add: Upon reflection, my analysis of the talk time is slightly wrong. The study means >=1640 hours lifetime cell phone usage. You can still use your cellphone 2.5 hours per month for 54 years before you reach this threshold. |