Personal radio use and cancer risks among 48,518 British police officers and staff from the Airwave Health Monitoring Study

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Abstract

Background

Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) from mobile phones have been classified as potentially carcinogenic. No study has investigated use of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), a source of RF-EMF with wide occupational use, and cancer risks.

Methods

We investigated association of monthly personal radio use and risk of cancer using Cox proportional hazards regression among 48,518 police officers and staff of the Airwave Health Monitoring Study in Great Britain.

Results

During median follow-up of 5.9 years, 716 incident cancer cases were identified. Among users, the median of the average monthly duration of use in the year prior to enrolment was 30.5 min (inter-quartile range 8.1, 68.1). Overall, there was no association between personal radio use and risk of all cancers (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.98, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.93, 1.03). For head and neck cancers HR = 0.72 (95% CI: 0.30, 1.70) among personal radio users vs non-users, and among users it was 1.06 (95% CI: 0.91, 1.23) per doubling of minutes of personal radio use.

Conclusions

With the limited follow-up to date, we found no evidence of association of personal radio use with cancer risk. Continued follow-up of the cohort is warranted.

Related collections

Most cited references 17

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The rapid increase in mobile telephone use has generated concern about possible health risks related to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields from this technology. An interview-based case-control study with 2708 glioma and 2409 meningioma cases and matched controls was conducted in 13 countries using a common protocol. A reduced odds ratio (OR) related to ever having been a regular mobile phone user was seen for glioma [OR 0.81; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.70-0.94] and meningioma (OR 0.79; 95% CI 0.68-0.91), possibly reflecting participation bias or other methodological limitations. No elevated OR was observed > or =10 years after first phone use (glioma: OR 0.98; 95% CI 0.76-1.26; meningioma: OR 0.83; 95% CI 0.61-1.14). ORs were or =1640 h, the OR was 1.40 (95% CI 1.03-1.89) for glioma, and 1.15 (95% CI 0.81-1.62) for meningioma; but there are implausible values of reported use in this group. ORs for glioma tended to be greater in the temporal lobe than in other lobes of the brain, but the CIs around the lobe-specific estimates were wide. ORs for glioma tended to be greater in subjects who reported usual phone use on the same side of the head as their tumour than on the opposite side. 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.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Paul Elliott: +020 7594 3328 , p.elliott@imperial.ac.uk

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Br J Cancer

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Br. J. Cancer

Title: British Journal of Cancer

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK (London )

ISSN (Print): 0007-0920

ISSN (Electronic): 1532-1827

Publication date (Electronic): 26 December 2018

Publication date PMC-release: 26 December 2018

Publication date (Print): 5 February 2019

Volume: 120

Issue: 3

Pages: 375-378

Affiliations

[1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, GRID grid.7445.2, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK

[2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 1516 2393, GRID grid.5947.f, Faculty of Medicine, , Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), ; Trondheim, Norway

[3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, GRID grid.7445.2, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK

[4 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, GRID grid.7445.2, NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Health Effects of Environmental Hazards, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK

[5 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, GRID grid.7445.2, UK Dementia Research Institute (DRI) at Imperial College, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK

[6 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, GRID grid.7445.2, Health Data Research-UK (HDR) London Centre at Imperial College, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK

Article

Publisher ID: 365

DOI: 10.1038/s41416-018-0365-6

PMC ID: 6354010

PubMed ID: 30585256

SO-VID: 26a6d96b-552c-439b-b0c8-fbc5705d56df

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date received : 11 March 2018

Date revision received : 30 November 2018

Date accepted : 30 November 2018

Funding

Funded by: DCM is supported by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Fellowship.

Funded by: The Study is funded by the Home Office (grant number 780-TETRA) with additional support from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). P.E. acknowledges support from the Imperial BRC, the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health (MR/L01341X/1), the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit on Health Impact of Environmental Hazards (HPRU-2012-10141), and the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College supported by UK DRI Ltd, which is funded by the UK Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK. P.E. is associate director of Health Data Research UK London which is funded by a consortium led by the Medical Research Council. The Airwave Health Monitoring Study uses the computing resources of the UK MEDical BIOinformatics partnership - aggregation, integration, visualization and analysis of large, complex data (UK MED-BIO), which is supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/L01632X/1). The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the sponsors.

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Oncology & Radiotherapy

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Oncology & Radiotherapy

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