A study to determine if long-term mobile phone use can lead to brain cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases has been started by scientists from Imperial College, London.
Previous studies have shown that people exposed to mobile phones for more than a decade have a two-fold risk of developing brain cancer on the side of the head where they held the handset.The researchers are studying 90,000 mobile-phone users in the country over the years to analyse the effect of the long-term handset use, reports the Independent.
The study is also likely to involve 200,000 people in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and hopes to increase its range to other European countries.
They boffins say that the study is important because cancers take at least 10 years, and normally much longer, to develop, but the phones have spread so rapidly that relatively few people have been using them for that long.
It has been said that phones do not cause the disease, however, the notion has been of little value as they are based on research that, at best, includes few people who have been exposed to radiation from the phones long enough.
Mike Bell, chairman of the Radiation Research Trust, hailed the launch of the new study as a "breakthrough" and said it had partly come about because of the way the IoS had put the issue "into the public domain".
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