Cell phone radiation may cause cancer, new government study finds

It’s the news everyone has been dreading: That little cell phone that people use all the time could cause cancer.

However, before you throw your phone across the room, the authors of the study have not said how the study’s findings on rats can compare to effects on humans.

The National Toxicology Program study exposed rats to radiation emitted from our cell phones for two and a half years.

The rats exposed to the radiation developed more tumors in the brain and heart that could be linked to cancer than the control group, which was not exposed.

Interestingly, the malignant tumors occurred more in male rats than female rats and more often in the heart than in the brain.

There were only a few female rats found with tumors in the study, and authors said it was not a statistically significant amount.

The study looked for gliomas, malignant tumors in the nervous system, and schwannomas of the heart, another type of tumor. In male rats, 2 percent who were exposed to the radiation developed gliomas and 5.6 percent developed schwannomas.

The study’s authors did not say how their results would translate into a cancer risk for humans. But given how many people use cell phones in the world, the authors wrote that this first step was important.

“Given the extremely large number of people who use wireless communication devices,” they wrote, “even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure to (cell phone radiation) resulting from those devices could have broad implications for public health.”

Peer reviewer Dr. Michael S. Lauer doubted the findings, saying he was skeptical of the study’s claims.

“I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings,” he wrote.

Lauer had a particular issue with the fact that male rats in the control group, and therefore not exposed to the cell phone radiation, had a low survival rate. Only 28 percent survived the length of the study, and the average survival rate of rats in National Toxicology Program studies is 47 percent.

Researchers said they did not know how to explain that low rate.

This story was originally published May 27, 2016 at 9:49 AM with the headline "Cell phone radiation may cause cancer, new government study finds."