It is curious. I wonder why non-ionizing radiation causes cancer? Given we are constantly bathing in wifi signals and cellphone signals, I wonder what the effects will be?
Current scientific consensus is that it's unlikely that it does, however it's not completely ruled out. Risk of cancer from microwave radiation is considered to be thermal in nature. Unlike the background signals we are surrounded by, when making a phone call, you hold the phone to your head, meaning roughly half of the transmission energy is directed towards it. Furthermore, your brain is mostly water which absorbs microwaves well. That said, the heat generated by the absorption results in a very minimal increase in temperature, which is carried away by blood flow. Nerves are particularly sensitive to microwave burns, but this it observed at higher intensities.
The strength of those signals is very, very low. WiFi around -60dBm or lower most of the time and the cellular signal where I go is usually well below -80dBm. For comparison, the power received from Earth's nearest star Alpha Centauri A is on the order of -50dBm. If I'm concerned about WiFi and cellular signals I should be positively freaked out about natural sources of em radiation.
But having a couple watt transmitter pressed against the side of your head might be something to think about. Still, it is non-ionizing radiation and aside from the possibility of localized heating, which you would likely notice (I think?), what's going to cause cancer? Some previously unknown (to me) phenomenon?
Ok smarty. But you can choose to go outside only at night when the Sun isn't in the sky. But the sky is filled with other stars day and night. So you can never go outside if you are afraid of em radiation as weak as that emitted by WiFi hotspots or cellular phone towers.
DNA is a conductor, and it's possible that inducing current on the wire will jam electrical signals used by certain DNA correcting proteins (like the BER system) to hone in on mutations. The frequencies that cellphones operate on are known to induce currents on DNA.
A recent study[1] found that blue light from smartphones are linked to some cancers. The cancers are not caused directly by blue light, but are caused by the fact that melatonine is surpressed by certain light temperatures, and disrupting melatonine and thus the circadian rythm can increase cancer risk.
I'm guessing that the mechanism found in this HN submission's story also uses some non-obvious, indirect mechanism. Biology is messy and complex.
Many people have thought that consistently putting an intentional radiator less than an inch from your brain is a bad idea. That is not to say that it causes disease, only that it has occurred to many people that this is a hypothesis worth testing.
Maybe the paper addresses this, but don't most people hold the phone predominantly on one side or the other? Wouldn't the locations of the tumors be more on that side of the brain? And wouldn't that provide some pretty good support for the association?
I can't find the cite right now, but I recall there was a study some years back that found that heavy mobile phone users didn't have any higher rate of brain cancer than the general population, but among those who did get cancer, there was a strong statistical correlation between the side of the head where they most used the phone and the location of the cancer.
I'm calling it now, there's some gene which codes for "sense of direction" and results in some kind of magnetic element embedded in some nerve cells (the way some birds 'see' the Earth's magnetic field), which also makes them vulnerable to excessive EMF radiaton.
I recall reading that this data was self-reported and, if taken at face value, would suggest that using a cell phone on one side of your head actually prevented cancer on the other, relative to base rates (in other words, the self-reported data is probably not accurate).
That is what I thought as well, but on HN of all places I see people fretting about speech quality of mobile phones and networks and such. When I walk around in big cities I see people text and, especially in China, people leaving eachother voice messages via wechat.
Most people I see leaving voice messages do that by just holding the microphone towards them to be able to still use the screen (for Whatsapp you had to keep pressing the button until recently). That keeps the phone away from your head. Same goes for Skyping or using headsets.
While data usage has scyrocketed, voice (call time) has remained constant, or even increased over time. Data usage eats on other items (like tv and desktop use) not call time.
I would like to say just a couple of things thast I'm sure everybody is already aware of:
- Correlation does not imply causality.
- No link to any study is given. So we cannot be sure about what the metodology is, I would very much like to take a look at the metodology used to imply such correlation.
Brain tumors take several years to even decades to develop and become apparent. This rise in tumors detected now could have been caused in the days of analog phones with radios that had vastly higher power output. Or, for that matter, analog cordless phones.
GBM tumors are super aggressive and there's no known cause. If you get diagnosed with a GBM your five year survival rate is 10%. Whatever the cause once the tumor gets started you have a months, not years before you know it.
You mention a key key point: "once the tumor gets started ". Cancer does not start immediately, the effects leading up to it accumulate over long periods. That was OPs point, although I disagree for the reason mentioned in the other reply.
It doesn't make sense to me that we would find a detectable rise on that basis, because in the days of analog phones with high powered radios, it was a very small proportion of the population using them.
I certainly knew what they looked like, before I had my first cell phone, because stockbrokers or lawyers or whatever in movies used them. But I never knew anyone who had one, or saw one in real life. They definitely preceded the current ubiquity of cell phones.
I would think that such phones did not have as high powered radios as a cellular phone due to less transmission distance required. I also have the impression that they weren't overly popular because of the ease of eavesdropping.
If analog cordless phones captured interference from fluorescent lighting and automotive ignition systems[1], does that mean there is a vast array of things that could cause health effects via RF?
To clarify, GBM is the only kind of cancer that increased in frequency in the data they have. I'm less inclined to think that these "findings" are accurate and more to think it's a matter of accounting and data quality. (Not to mention the quality of the manuscript itself.)
In fairness, GBM is brutal and has a life expectancy measured in months, not years, even with treatment.
On the other hand, it's a subset with ~15% proportion of all brain tumors. The article's title suggests that all brain tumor rates doubled and I am clarifying.
>Our results highlight an urgent need for funding more research into the initiation and promotion
of GBM tumours. This should include the use of CT imaging for diagnosis and also modern
lifestyle factors that may affect tumour metabolism.
There is very little mention of cell phones in that paper, they only seem to reference a paper from 2015 regarding data from 2000-2003 (higher antennae output back then?)[0] They mention:
>a 50-minute cell phone exposure produced a statistically significant increase in brain glucose metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex and temporal pole regions closest to the handset
[0]Hardell and M. Carlberg, “Mobile phone and cordless phone use and the risk for glioma – Analysis of pooled
case–control studies in Sweden, 1997–2003 and 2007–2009,” Pathophysiology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2015.
doi:10.1016/j.pathophys.2014.10.001. [Online First 2014 Oct 29]
"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 3,000."
~2000 new cases per year in a country with 53 million people? I'll take my chances.
I'm fascinated how people obsess over the unproven and ultimately minuscule health risks associated with using a cell phone or drinking a glass of wine or eating chocolate or whatever. We know for a fact that smoking, overeating, and not exercising kill literally tens of millions of people each year, but it seems like most people can't be bothered to take those health risks seriously...
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.
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.
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.
The burden of proof rests on the person making the claim (the person claiming that some smokers/drinkers live to 100) rather than the person challenging it.
Perhaps less stress and better lifestyle (quality of life) is the key to fewer cancers and such, as opposed to cutting smoking and drinking -- even with the increased burden on the lungs and such.
worst case, average case is more than an order of magnitude lower for cardiac related death:
2/100.000 for cardiac related death by excercise.
1278.9/100.000 normal
1879.4/100.000 obese (combined, so about 1.5 increase)
So yes, outliers. Though the numbers are difficult to compare since the timespan of the research is different and the age groups could be off. But you asked for numbers.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
1) Most people aren't autopsied upon death, autopsies are only performed in limited circumstances. I don't personally know of a single person whom died who an autopsy was performed on.
2) The article is vague and short but "cases of GBM in England have increased from around 1,250 a year in 1995 to just under 3,000" almost certainly refers to diagnosed cases of GBM, not including incidentals found in autopsies.
Autopsies are performed when the cause of death is indeterminate. Most people die of a known cause. A family member of mine was autopsied (in the UK) when they died unexpectedly. I expect that if killed by brain cancer, you'll either present symptoms resulting in a diagnosis (albeit a late one), or die unexpectedly and be autopsied.
Glioblastomas are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Its entirely possible that 20 years ago the symptoms of a brain tumor would be attributed to Alzheimer's when the patient was already dying of Alzheimer's, or other terminal illness for that matter. With better awareness and detection we may pick up new diagnoses in the sick and dying.
It's actually more complicated than that- we'd need to know the survival rate for procedures carried out at different discovery times.
If the cancer is basically inoperable, or if there isn't a big difference in outcome based on time of detection, then there wouldn't be an appreciable change in survival rates
> If the cancer is basically inoperable, or if there isn't a big difference in outcome based on time of detection, then there wouldn't be an appreciable change in survival rates
Lead time bias tells you that even if there is no effective treatment, you will appear to live longer thanks to earlier discovery of the disease. It was a hot topic with regard to prostate cancer a few years ago.
Going further, I'd expect the number of unidentified/misidentified cases to decrease as information flows more freely alongside the internet's growth since 1995. Today, a doctor can investigate a brain tumor from their phone in ways that were impossible using a top research library in 1995. In particular, the internet is really good at surfacing long tail information, and a rare cancer is by definition out in the long tail. Today, I can go from about zero knowledge about the subject to a remarkable level of awareness the within seconds deciding to add an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glioma The world today is such that I get that awareness increase while I am typing this comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's more along the lines of: electromagnetic radiation causes tissue to warm up, warmer tissue can lead to trouble. The problem is that todays cell phones output extremely low amounts of EM but at very high frequencies. And that makes it a very hard problem to determine whether or not there is an actual risk.
Absent evidence of harm AND a plausible mechanism for harm there is no reason to assume harm. All we have at the moment is an uptick in a particular kind of cancer without a plausible mechanism how do we assign that to cell phones?
Why don't we see a similar uptick everywhere for example instead of just in england?
The plausible mechanism is that EM radiation causes tissue to warm up, which can damage it. This is well documented, and will happen already at frequencies far below what a mobile phone uses.
> All we have at the moment is an uptick in a particular kind of cancer without a plausible mechanism how do we assign that to cell phones?
Because of the location of the tumors.
> Why don't we see a similar uptick everywhere for example instead of just in england?
Because that's where this research was done.
Look, no matter what this is a very subtle affair. The only thing that this research has done - according to me - is to move the needle from 'instant dismiss' to 'maybe more and more careful research should be done' to determine the exact magnitude of the effect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not that other risks exist. It's that doubling a tiny risk still leaves a tiny risk.
I don't need a brain surgeon to tell me they're seeing lots of people with brain tumour. I need a public health statistician telling what my risk is with and without a cellphone.
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.
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.
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.
> cases of GBM in England have increased from around 1,250 a year in 1995 to just under 3,000.
Not only the population of UK has increased in this time, it has also gotten older on average. Moreover is 0.002% of population getting GBM per year even significant enough to blame mobile phones (that is used by everyone)?
It doesn't have to be linked to age, just a yearly probability summed over more years.
Then you can start adding in the things that make people live longer, like less heart disease per year of life, etc., and you get the same effect they are charting.
Any cancer is related to age in the sense that the older a person is, the more opportunity they've had to encounter it. I suppose the best way to look at it is see how many cumulative years a population represents: if a population is getting older on average, then the cumulative years have risen, therefore there's been more opportunity to encounter this disease.
Maybe, but has earlier detection really impacted GBM much? It's not like breast or testicular cancer - we can't encourage the population to "examine your brain for lumps". Even today someone could have no obvious symptoms of GBM one day, then have a seizure while driving and die in a car crash the next day.
Though I guess if car crashes were a common cause of death that doesn't require autopsy, you'd see some difference in GBM rates between car heavy places like the US, vs places with better public transit like EU.
My little brother died of a GBM about 3 years ago. The research I did at the time indicated that there are essentially no known predictors of GBMs; there appears to be a very slight correlation with being white, male, and ~30-50, all which matched for him.
> Not only the population of UK has increased in this time, it has also gotten older on average.
Every study that measures disease or death rates takes this into account. They use standard populations (standard millions) to create age-adjusted statistics. In this case it was European Standard Population (ESP–2013) they used.
The article reports increase in all age groups. The article is not making any link between brain cancer and mobile phones. There is just little speculation to crate headlines.
"According to Cancer Research UK, it is “unlikely” that mobile phones increase the risk of brain tumours however “we do not know enough to completely rule out a risk”.
However, the organisation cautions that because phones are a relatively recent invention it may take many more years until the data is sufficient to make more robust conclusions."
This is literally pure speculation. There are many things that should be studied further to see if something more than a correlation exists. However those studies haven't been done yet. I am surprised to see such a poor and clearly clickbait on hackernews.
You only get cancer in tissues with active cell division, such as the skin or epithelial tissue.
For the hand that's the skin. Most cells in the body don't divide after your initial growth phase (all the way to adulthood). You are "produced" once and from then on there only is "maintenance", which includes growth of new cells only in tissues that absolutely require it throughout lifetime. Evolution turned it off in as many cells of an adult body as possible because cell division always is risky, especially with increasing (cell/tissue) age.
While cancer rates are often higher in cell types with higher division rates, there are many other risk factors. The increased incidence of skin cancer is due largely to exposure to mutagenic ionising radiation from the sun, which is absorbed readily by the skin. Microwave radiation is more deeply penetrating. Although I believe it is unlikely to cause cancer.
Yes of course. My point was merely binary, about what kinds of tissue can get cancer. I thought that was appropriate for a question starting with "Is it possible".
It's not clear to me that it's a bad comparison for several reasons.
(a) I don't think it's typical to make direct contact with a cell phone for an hour at a time. Most calls I make are short and I don't actually hold it touching my ear. That does depend on the noise level though.
(b) Microwaves are much higher power.
(c) Microwaves may be constructed to looser tolerances regarding shielding.
Yes, microwaves are different, but the differences don't uniformly cut in one direction, so I think it's a little too glib to dismiss the hazard out of hand.
Edit: One could argue that in fact your ear holds your phone away from your head, providing an offset analogous to the distance one is observing a microwave from. But this is really a rhetorical answer to a rhetorical objection, when my point is more that only quantitative analysis could illuminate the accuracy of the comparison.
The prompting for my original post is that I was microwaving water to boiling and watching to make sure it didn't superheat - unlike on the stove, it can form a big bubble of steam suddenly. It seems to me that I do this nearly as often as I make a phone call (as opposed to texting and email).
That's not how I meant it. I don't think it's typical of phone calls; it is certainly common among people who make phone calls.
Also, both qualifications in that sentence are important - not only "an hour at a time", but "direct contact". I have been on long calls at work with a landline/VOIP phone and found my ear hurts after a while with the earpiece resting against my ear. So I know that when my ear does not hurt it is because I have not been holding the phone against it for a long time.
Cellphones are designed to shield your head from radiation, and instead direct transmissions outwards away from it. There are legal limits on the radiation absorbed by a human head while talking on the phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate#Mobil...
So basically yes, phones do have shielding (on the head side only)
When I'm just standing near my running microwave, bluetooth will totally drop out and WiFi will degrade so even with shielding it must surely be radiating a lot more than a phone. Haven't payed attention to how the LTE signal is affected though.
I'm curious how much time most people spend actually talking on their phones now compared to pre-smartphones. Also, while I suppose being in an active call probably changes the amount of radiation at play, I'd expect, if cell phones are causing cancer, an attendant rise in, say, testicular cancer.
I've never been a fan of holding an active transmitter (cell phone) against the side of my head, preferring to use either speakerphone or a corded headset of some type. But I wonder: how much danger does a Bluetooth wireless headset present compared to the phone itself?
I have the impression that, since the era of smartphones, people actually talk on their cellphones less, and text more. If so, and if there were anything to this article's posited link, then we would expect the rate of tumors to drop again in the coming years. Just a speculation.
1. Fewer tumors with texting, yes, especially when fatal car crashes due to texting are factored in.
2. Texting, especially long-form MMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, etc., replace the need for phone calls in a lot of cases. I do think of my iPhone as a portable computer that also has voice-communications capability...
It's probably very hard to tell, specially since cellphones will dynamically adapt their transmission power depending on the conditions - anything from 0.7mW to 4.4mW[1]. By contrast, a bluetooth device of class 2 (most headsets) is limited to 2.5mW[2], but who knows how much they actually use within that limit.
My father sought to answer the same questions after he started to fear what transmitters might be doing to him/us. As far as I understand his findings, the "strength" of the signal could potentially be as high with blutooth as with 3G/4G, for use with his devices in his environment. His recommendation is therefore to avoid all transmitters close to your body, and prefer wires at all times.
All anecdotal ofc, and I have not in any way verified the instruments he used for his tests.
Bluetooth class 3 is 1 mW peak power, class 2 is 2.5 mW peak power. Those are the most relevant for a headset.
For a cell phone, the peak power for 2G is 2W, while for 4G/LTE it's 200 mW.
Those are peak transmit power. In practice the actual power will be lower for BT. For cellular it depends very much on the frequency band used. For low band the phone will mostly be far from the peak. For high bands the device will mostly be at peak power or close most of the time.
Nice analysis. Just thinking of it intuitively, the cell phone transmitter has to send data several km, whereas the bluetooth only has to transmit a few meters. Couple that with the inverse square law, and a bluetooth headset sounds much lower power.
Pretty sure this is complete B.S considering the view of talking on the phone millenials and younger have. Like, there are literal memes about one being horrified and the sound of a phone ringing, which to me seems like a good indicator that we're talking less on the phone, so why would brain tumors increase?
I tried to find some statistics on Google, the statistics are all over the place but they all still show far far higher rates of making voice calls than I would have predicted (numbers look something like: 20% of time on phone spent talking, 1 hour a day spent talking, average 10 calls per day, even for teens - for the last stat, teens made more calls than anyone)
While there may be less calls made overall, one thing to consider is that more calls may be being made by mobile phones rather than by landlines, which are increasingly replaced by mobile phones.
This finding (fully believing it is at best anecdotal and preliminary at this point) brought TTF "tumor treating fields" therapy to mind.
In the last year or so a medical device was approved by the FDA to treat brain tumors (Optune, Novocure Inc) in which the patient uses helmet that introduces alternating electrical field though the area of the tumor ( ie the patient head). It sounds super crazy, but it seems to have reached statistical significance in a couple large brain cancer studies. There are some caveats about selection bias of patients in these studies ( e.g, patients that enrolled/stayed in the study were motivated/strong enough to carry the heavy backpack and wear an onerous helmet) but it is being used and has some scientists and clinicians scratching their heads. Novocure is expanding application to multiple other cancers.
How much power did the helmet had? If you put your head inside a microwave oven with a power of 800W for a day it will probably hurt you. You can probably fry the tumor (and all your brain) with 800W. (IANAMD)
A cell phone has only 2-4W, so it's the power is much smaller and the risk is not linear.
These types of articles are fear mongering, pure and simple.
Just like eating a banana every week gives you more of a radiation dose than living next to a nuclear power plant- the possibility of getting cancer from a cell phone is almost ridiculous.
The title is pretty deceptive, it seems to claim the study finds a link between cellphones and cancer.
Although the group did apparently comment on cellphones as a thing to investigate.
> Last night the group said the increasing rate of tumours in the frontal temporal lobe “raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas”.
Are we all mature enough to agree that we can still acknowledge that Cell phones might cause cancer in some people, and still be pro Technology? I dont see that much in the comments here. Poo-poo-ing this cancer issue is not helpful.
I'd also be interested to see how many more people just text or IM not talk compared to ten or twenty years ago. If there is a risk from cellphone EM radiation so it must also depend on phone usage and also modern phones emit less EM radiation?
For me my main concern is I use my phone as an alarm clock and it's 30cm (1 foot) from my head all night. I also leave it there since it's my main phone so I keep it close to me. Hopefully the inverse square law is on my side.
I'd be curious to see if any studies showed butt cancer was a thing. I'm sure many people keep their phones in their pockets and seems it would exposure people more EM radiation for longer compared to holding the phone and talking into it.
I'd also be curious if different countries which use different frequencies would be a factor in the ability of the EM radiation to penetrate deeper into skin.
I'm not convinced but I'm not anti-science so I'm OK with continual studies as long as they are conducted in a professional way.
By the way I recall in the late 80s early 90s there was talk about EM radiation from cordless shavers. Close to the jaw bone, powerful motor in a small space used daily.
The densification of the mobile/cellular network (greater number of cell sites and infill using smaller micro, pico and indoor sites) over the last 20 years also means that devices statistically operate at lower power levels most of the time.
> For me my main concern is I use my phone as an alarm clock and it's 30cm (1 foot) from my head all night. I also leave it there since it's my main phone so I keep it close to me. Hopefully the inverse square law is on my side.
The danger comes from when you are actively making calls using voice; my understanding is that transmitting voice data really cranks up the EM radiation. When making phone calls you are safest using a hands-free headset. When the phone is idle at night this is all mostly irrelevant unless you're getting poor signal (for which it cranks up EM to compensate).
So, don't sleep with your phone next to your head if you get poor signal. If not, there likely isn't much to worry about.
> I'd be curious to see if any studies showed butt cancer was a thing. I'm sure many people keep their phones in their pockets and seems it would exposure people more EM radiation for longer compared to holding the phone and talking into it.
When the phone is idle the EM radiation is relatively low. Plus, if it's resting against your thigh there isn't anything critical there to irradiate, compared to having it within two inches of your brain. If anything we might see more skin cancer in the future from this (and some say EM from pocket storage may contribute to infertility), but it beats brain cancer.
Is the EM radiation coming out as directional waves from the phone or is it more like a focused beam between the cell network towers through your skull into your phone? Thanks.
It is, but more importantly, quantum mechanics is on your side. It doesn’t matter how many photons your phone bombards you with, because it transmits and receives at non-ionizing frequencies. Each photon carries too little energy to excite an electron, which means it can’t cause cancer through the same mechanism that, say, x-rays can.
Maybe there is some other mechanism and I just haven’t seen it, being a layperson. But if so, the effect would seem to be too weak to measure reproducibly, and I figure there are much more real, pressing dangers to worry about (e.g. cell phone-related car crashes).
Story time, as is often the case when "studies" talk about medical risks.
Couple years ago I started noticing these events, deja vu flashes, tingly right arm from the shoulder all the way down to my fingers, and then the inability to comprehend words for a few minutes. Never issues with coordination, because the first one I remember distinctly was riding a bike. Eventually was told they could be seizures, got an MRI and EEG and poof, there's a brain tumor, told was a DNET, in my left temporal lobe.
After issues with anti-seizure meds, which are really annoying with so many side effects, I went with surgery to get the tumor yanked with the hope of them snagging the part causing the seizures, which apparently aren't caused by the tumor itself. A few weeks after the surgery, I was called back and told the tumor wasn't a DNET as expected, but a low grade glioma. Not the GBM as talked about in the article, but a regrowth where I'm on the schedule of MRI every three months to check to see how if it's growing back yet.
I'm left handed, holding the phone to my left ear where the tumor was / is, which would fit along with what they're trying to show here. I'm 27 now, I never talked on the phone much, and I'm not going to sit here and try to find something to blame. Like casually mentioned at the end of the article, I'll go with saying it could be from "fallout from atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere", or, you know, bad luck.
It would be these events were I'd get the deja vu, the feeling of having a memory of experiencing something before, then tingling from the right shoulder down my arm to when it hit my fingers I'd feel a little hit in the head and lose words. That part is the seizure. I didn't know that was a type at all before looking it up online.
These episodes grew over time too. That first I remember on a bike, the next was when reading a book and I was so confused where the words went and why I could only see symbols. Since it's the temporal lobe, only words. Though I talk to multiple people, like my mom, she says there were times in the past where, when talking to her, I'd have to say hold on and sit in silence for 30 seconds before being able to comprehend again. Eventually got to an every other day frequency before being told that those events could be seizures and I should get it checked out.
In terms of seriousness, it's hard to say when that happened. I was told it looked like the benign DNET tumor and baby seizures that stopped with some drugs and I thought that was pretty funny how that happened to me. But then side effects from the first drugs kicked in and I had to switch. And then side effects from that drug kicked in and said screw it and have the surgery to get ride of the tumor and hopefully the part causing the seizures. Well that didn't work out, I still have different drugs and problems with those, and turns out it's a cancer tumor. Quite the turn.
The seizures themselves aren't too serious, because there are drugs to stop them, but the side effect problems are the big part.
184 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadI expect we'll get a clearer picture in the coming years.
But having a couple watt transmitter pressed against the side of your head might be something to think about. Still, it is non-ionizing radiation and aside from the possibility of localized heating, which you would likely notice (I think?), what's going to cause cancer? Some previously unknown (to me) phenomenon?
I'm guessing that the mechanism found in this HN submission's story also uses some non-obvious, indirect mechanism. Biology is messy and complex.
[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/04/27/235230/blue-lig...
Many people have thought that consistently putting an intentional radiator less than an inch from your brain is a bad idea. That is not to say that it causes disease, only that it has occurred to many people that this is a hypothesis worth testing.
Check teenage girls -- it's not snapchat and the like all the time, they can still spend countless hours on voice calls with their friends...
https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/mobile-traffic-r...
https://qz.com/509442/why-are-we-still-calling-them-phones/
- Correlation does not imply causality.
- No link to any study is given. So we cannot be sure about what the metodology is, I would very much like to take a look at the metodology used to imply such correlation.
XKCD 925: Cell Phones
https://xkcd.com/925/
Here is a picture of a DynaTAC analog cell phone circa 1983: https://s.hswstatic.com/gif/cell-phone-old.jpg
I certainly knew what they looked like, before I had my first cell phone, because stockbrokers or lawyers or whatever in movies used them. But I never knew anyone who had one, or saw one in real life. They definitely preceded the current ubiquity of cell phones.
If analog cordless phones captured interference from fluorescent lighting and automotive ignition systems[1], does that mean there is a vast array of things that could cause health effects via RF?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordless_telephone
The provisional pdf is full of Tracked Changes.
To clarify, GBM is the only kind of cancer that increased in frequency in the data they have. I'm less inclined to think that these "findings" are accurate and more to think it's a matter of accounting and data quality. (Not to mention the quality of the manuscript itself.)
Only glioblstoma multiforme, aka the most aggressive and deadly brain cancer? Phfew, what a relief.
On the other hand, it's a subset with ~15% proportion of all brain tumors. The article's title suggests that all brain tumor rates doubled and I am clarifying.
>Our results highlight an urgent need for funding more research into the initiation and promotion of GBM tumours. This should include the use of CT imaging for diagnosis and also modern lifestyle factors that may affect tumour metabolism.
There is very little mention of cell phones in that paper, they only seem to reference a paper from 2015 regarding data from 2000-2003 (higher antennae output back then?)[0] They mention:
>a 50-minute cell phone exposure produced a statistically significant increase in brain glucose metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex and temporal pole regions closest to the handset
[0]Hardell and M. Carlberg, “Mobile phone and cordless phone use and the risk for glioma – Analysis of pooled case–control studies in Sweden, 1997–2003 and 2007–2009,” Pathophysiology, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2015. doi:10.1016/j.pathophys.2014.10.001. [Online First 2014 Oct 29]
~2000 new cases per year in a country with 53 million people? I'll take my chances.
I'm fascinated how people obsess over the unproven and ultimately minuscule health risks associated with using a cell phone or drinking a glass of wine or eating chocolate or whatever. We know for a fact that smoking, overeating, and not exercising kill literally tens of millions of people each year, but it seems like most people can't be bothered to take those health risks seriously...
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.
Numbers please.
One is just implicit.
Some of the longest living people in the world (e.g. in the island of Icaria) drink and smoke like it's 1977 and they have always been.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where...
Perhaps less stress and better lifestyle (quality of life) is the key to fewer cancers and such, as opposed to cutting smoking and drinking -- even with the increased burden on the lungs and such.
worst case, average case is more than an order of magnitude lower for cardiac related death:
2/100.000 for cardiac related death by excercise.
1278.9/100.000 normal
1879.4/100.000 obese (combined, so about 1.5 increase)
So yes, outliers. Though the numbers are difficult to compare since the timespan of the research is different and the age groups could be off. But you asked for numbers.
If this chart is accurate, 3.5 years older: https://www.statista.com/statistics/275394/median-age-of-the...
They really should have looked at rates by a given age.
Same with headset, I prefer the sound quality.
So none of these choices are made to avoid cancers.
2. Because these sensationalized risks are the ones that get coverage more than the true risks
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.
TBH it’s a reasonable assumption in every developed country except one.
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)
2) The article is vague and short but "cases of GBM in England have increased from around 1,250 a year in 1995 to just under 3,000" almost certainly refers to diagnosed cases of GBM, not including incidentals found in autopsies.
Glioblastomas are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Its entirely possible that 20 years ago the symptoms of a brain tumor would be attributed to Alzheimer's when the patient was already dying of Alzheimer's, or other terminal illness for that matter. With better awareness and detection we may pick up new diagnoses in the sick and dying.
If this is true (and I think you're likely to be right) then we should see longer survival with GBM thanks to lead-time bias.
If the cancer is basically inoperable, or if there isn't a big difference in outcome based on time of detection, then there wouldn't be an appreciable change in survival rates
Lead time bias tells you that even if there is no effective treatment, you will appear to live longer thanks to earlier discovery of the disease. It was a hot topic with regard to prostate cancer a few years ago.
The hammer makes me aware of nails.
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.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
If this was a story about brain tumors going undetected because of deliberate misdiagnosis, it would get a ton more press still.
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.
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.
Why don't we see a similar uptick everywhere for example instead of just in england?
That's what the article is about.
> a plausible mechanism for harm
The plausible mechanism is that EM radiation causes tissue to warm up, which can damage it. This is well documented, and will happen already at frequencies far below what a mobile phone uses.
> All we have at the moment is an uptick in a particular kind of cancer without a plausible mechanism how do we assign that to cell phones?
Because of the location of the tumors.
> Why don't we see a similar uptick everywhere for example instead of just in england?
Because that's where this research was done.
Look, no matter what this is a very subtle affair. The only thing that this research has done - according to me - is to move the needle from 'instant dismiss' to 'maybe more and more careful research should be done' to determine the exact magnitude of the effect.
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.
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/heal...
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.
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?
I was surprised these guys were worried about it. They all use wired earbuds, which says enough for me.
I sure have my phone adjacent to those parts of my body a whole lot more than my head.
I don't need a brain surgeon to tell me they're seeing lots of people with brain tumour. I need a public health statistician telling what my risk is with and without a cellphone.
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.
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.
Not only the population of UK has increased in this time, it has also gotten older on average. Moreover is 0.002% of population getting GBM per year even significant enough to blame mobile phones (that is used by everyone)?
Then you can start adding in the things that make people live longer, like less heart disease per year of life, etc., and you get the same effect they are charting.
Though I guess if car crashes were a common cause of death that doesn't require autopsy, you'd see some difference in GBM rates between car heavy places like the US, vs places with better public transit like EU.
Different ancestries carry with them different genetic predispositions. It might be that the GBM rise is due to phenotypes not phones.
[1] http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings...
Every study that measures disease or death rates takes this into account. They use standard populations (standard millions) to create age-adjusted statistics. In this case it was European Standard Population (ESP–2013) they used.
The article reports increase in all age groups. The article is not making any link between brain cancer and mobile phones. There is just little speculation to crate headlines.
However, the organisation cautions that because phones are a relatively recent invention it may take many more years until the data is sufficient to make more robust conclusions."
This is literally pure speculation. There are many things that should be studied further to see if something more than a correlation exists. However those studies haven't been done yet. I am surprised to see such a poor and clearly clickbait on hackernews.
For the hand that's the skin. Most cells in the body don't divide after your initial growth phase (all the way to adulthood). You are "produced" once and from then on there only is "maintenance", which includes growth of new cells only in tissues that absolutely require it throughout lifetime. Evolution turned it off in as many cells of an adult body as possible because cell division always is risky, especially with increasing (cell/tissue) age.
(a) I don't think it's typical to make direct contact with a cell phone for an hour at a time. Most calls I make are short and I don't actually hold it touching my ear. That does depend on the noise level though. (b) Microwaves are much higher power. (c) Microwaves may be constructed to looser tolerances regarding shielding.
Yes, microwaves are different, but the differences don't uniformly cut in one direction, so I think it's a little too glib to dismiss the hazard out of hand.
Edit: One could argue that in fact your ear holds your phone away from your head, providing an offset analogous to the distance one is observing a microwave from. But this is really a rhetorical answer to a rhetorical objection, when my point is more that only quantitative analysis could illuminate the accuracy of the comparison.
The prompting for my original post is that I was microwaving water to boiling and watching to make sure it didn't superheat - unlike on the stove, it can form a big bubble of steam suddenly. It seems to me that I do this nearly as often as I make a phone call (as opposed to texting and email).
Do you have any family who live more than 30 minutes away?
Also, both qualifications in that sentence are important - not only "an hour at a time", but "direct contact". I have been on long calls at work with a landline/VOIP phone and found my ear hurts after a while with the earpiece resting against my ear. So I know that when my ear does not hurt it is because I have not been holding the phone against it for a long time.
How? A cellphone literally can't shield its radiation, otherwise it wouldn't really work.
So basically yes, phones do have shielding (on the head side only)
https://qz.com/509442/why-are-we-still-calling-them-phones/
I distinctly remember it on a Ericsson ear piece (single ear fold out).
I've noticed that these devices dont have that warning anymore...
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7879218
[2] https://www.sans.edu/cyber-research/security-laboratory/arti...
All anecdotal ofc, and I have not in any way verified the instruments he used for his tests.
For a cell phone, the peak power for 2G is 2W, while for 4G/LTE it's 200 mW.
Those are peak transmit power. In practice the actual power will be lower for BT. For cellular it depends very much on the frequency band used. For low band the phone will mostly be far from the peak. For high bands the device will mostly be at peak power or close most of the time.
A cell phone has only 2-4W, so it's the power is much smaller and the risk is not linear.
Just like eating a banana every week gives you more of a radiation dose than living next to a nuclear power plant- the possibility of getting cancer from a cell phone is almost ridiculous.
How is this about mobile phones? I think this is pure clickbait and should be removed.
Although the group did apparently comment on cellphones as a thing to investigate.
> Last night the group said the increasing rate of tumours in the frontal temporal lobe “raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas”.
For me my main concern is I use my phone as an alarm clock and it's 30cm (1 foot) from my head all night. I also leave it there since it's my main phone so I keep it close to me. Hopefully the inverse square law is on my side.
I'd be curious to see if any studies showed butt cancer was a thing. I'm sure many people keep their phones in their pockets and seems it would exposure people more EM radiation for longer compared to holding the phone and talking into it.
I'd also be curious if different countries which use different frequencies would be a factor in the ability of the EM radiation to penetrate deeper into skin.
I'm not convinced but I'm not anti-science so I'm OK with continual studies as long as they are conducted in a professional way.
By the way I recall in the late 80s early 90s there was talk about EM radiation from cordless shavers. Close to the jaw bone, powerful motor in a small space used daily.
The danger comes from when you are actively making calls using voice; my understanding is that transmitting voice data really cranks up the EM radiation. When making phone calls you are safest using a hands-free headset. When the phone is idle at night this is all mostly irrelevant unless you're getting poor signal (for which it cranks up EM to compensate).
So, don't sleep with your phone next to your head if you get poor signal. If not, there likely isn't much to worry about.
> I'd be curious to see if any studies showed butt cancer was a thing. I'm sure many people keep their phones in their pockets and seems it would exposure people more EM radiation for longer compared to holding the phone and talking into it.
When the phone is idle the EM radiation is relatively low. Plus, if it's resting against your thigh there isn't anything critical there to irradiate, compared to having it within two inches of your brain. If anything we might see more skin cancer in the future from this (and some say EM from pocket storage may contribute to infertility), but it beats brain cancer.
It is, but more importantly, quantum mechanics is on your side. It doesn’t matter how many photons your phone bombards you with, because it transmits and receives at non-ionizing frequencies. Each photon carries too little energy to excite an electron, which means it can’t cause cancer through the same mechanism that, say, x-rays can.
Maybe there is some other mechanism and I just haven’t seen it, being a layperson. But if so, the effect would seem to be too weak to measure reproducibly, and I figure there are much more real, pressing dangers to worry about (e.g. cell phone-related car crashes).
Couple years ago I started noticing these events, deja vu flashes, tingly right arm from the shoulder all the way down to my fingers, and then the inability to comprehend words for a few minutes. Never issues with coordination, because the first one I remember distinctly was riding a bike. Eventually was told they could be seizures, got an MRI and EEG and poof, there's a brain tumor, told was a DNET, in my left temporal lobe.
After issues with anti-seizure meds, which are really annoying with so many side effects, I went with surgery to get the tumor yanked with the hope of them snagging the part causing the seizures, which apparently aren't caused by the tumor itself. A few weeks after the surgery, I was called back and told the tumor wasn't a DNET as expected, but a low grade glioma. Not the GBM as talked about in the article, but a regrowth where I'm on the schedule of MRI every three months to check to see how if it's growing back yet.
I'm left handed, holding the phone to my left ear where the tumor was / is, which would fit along with what they're trying to show here. I'm 27 now, I never talked on the phone much, and I'm not going to sit here and try to find something to blame. Like casually mentioned at the end of the article, I'll go with saying it could be from "fallout from atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere", or, you know, bad luck.
Can you explain the deja vu, tingling, etc symptoms a bit more
This has me a little nervous and I want to be sure it’s something I need to get concerned about
Did you actually end up having seizures?
How did you know it was serious?
These episodes grew over time too. That first I remember on a bike, the next was when reading a book and I was so confused where the words went and why I could only see symbols. Since it's the temporal lobe, only words. Though I talk to multiple people, like my mom, she says there were times in the past where, when talking to her, I'd have to say hold on and sit in silence for 30 seconds before being able to comprehend again. Eventually got to an every other day frequency before being told that those events could be seizures and I should get it checked out.
In terms of seriousness, it's hard to say when that happened. I was told it looked like the benign DNET tumor and baby seizures that stopped with some drugs and I thought that was pretty funny how that happened to me. But then side effects from the first drugs kicked in and I had to switch. And then side effects from that drug kicked in and said screw it and have the surgery to get ride of the tumor and hopefully the part causing the seizures. Well that didn't work out, I still have different drugs and problems with those, and turns out it's a cancer tumor. Quite the turn.
The seizures themselves aren't too serious, because there are drugs to stop them, but the side effect problems are the big part.
What are the symptoms you've been having?