Microwave News | New Clues on Colorectal Cancer Among Young Adults
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New Clues on Colorectal Cancer Among Young Adults
Higher Risks When Cell Phone Is Carried Below the Waist
September 30, 2024
It’s a long-running medical mystery: Why have so many people under 50 in affluent countries been developing colorectal cancer in recent decades?
Something new is triggering a jump in what’s known as early-onset colon and rectal cancer (EOCRC). The rates have been going up for the last 20 years and no one knows why it’s happening. The usual risk factors for CRC —obesity, smoking, bad diet and lack of exercise— don’t fully explain the increase.
Source: Health, June 7, 2024
Five years ago, De-Kun Li, a senior epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, offered a new possibility: carrying a cell phone below the waist. When placed in a pocket below the belt, the phone transmits RF radiation into the abdomen. Given that RF has been shown to cause cancer in animal experiments, Li thought it was a plausible risk factor. (This is what I wrote at the time.)
The idea didn’t catch on, but Li persisted and conducted a pilot study to test his hypothesis. It convinced him that he may be onto something.
It’s a small study, designed to survey 50 cases of EOCRC and 50 matched controls. He found that those who carried a phone below the waist were four times more likely to develop tumors.
EOCRC Tumors on the Left Side
Li found that the link between cell phone carrying and EOCRC is strongest when the phone was kept on the same side as where the tumor developed.
EOCRC tends to develop on the left side of the colon. Those who carried a phone on the left side for more than 30,000 hours were 12 times more likely to develop a tumor on that side of the colon. This elevated risk for what’s called ipsilateral carrying is statistically significant. (36,000 hours is equivalent to about ten years of RF exposure.)
Those who kept the phone on their right side —contralateral carrying— had only a slightly increased CRC risk for left-side colon cancer, according to Li.
“The striking contrast between a strong association with ipsilateral carrying and largely no association with contralateral carrying is the most notable finding,” Li told me in an email exchange.
There were not enough cases of right-side colon cancer for a right-side carrying risk analysis in this pilot study, but Li believes that if his hypothesis is correct and he were able to do a larger study, a similarly elevated risk would be seen for right-side ipsilateral carrying.
Li presented his results in late August at the annual conference of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), held this year in Santiago, Chile. His poster paper is below; the ISEE abstract is here.
De-Kun Li’s Poster Presentation at ISEE 2024 in Santiago (click to expand)
Another Opinion
As it happened, Kurt Straif was also going to the Santiago meeting, and I asked him to check out Li’s paper. Straif, formerly the head of the IARC Monograph Section in Lyon, now has appointments at Boston College in the U.S. and ISGlobal in Spain. He oversaw the 2011 IARC meeting where RF radiation was judged to be a possible human carcinogen. Straif is currently a member of the team preparing a systematic review of the RF–animal cancer literature for the WHO’s EMF Project.
“I’m skeptical,” Straif told me when he got back from Chile. “It’s a small study reporting implausibly strong associations with very wide confidence intervals.” Straif is not yet willing to discount the existing CRC risk factors for the rise in EOCRC. They —particularly obesity— are still “plausible, at least partially,” he said, especially given that there is “no robust evidence for new risk factors, environmental or otherwise.”
In any case, Straif continued, the timing is off: Widespread use of mobile phones among younger people “comes only after the dramatic increase of EOCRC, especially when you take into account a latency period between exposure and disease.”
I asked Li to address Straif’s concerns. He acknowledged that the numerical risk estimates should not be taken too literally given the relatively small sample size of the pilot study. “They could have been smaller or larger,” he said. “It’s the striking difference between the ipsilateral and contralateral risks that we should pay attention to.”
Li also disagrees with Straif on the timing: “Cell phones became popular before the steady rise in EOCRC incidence,” he said. “Of course, the unknown part is the latency: We do not know how long the latency is for EOCRC.”
“Please remember that genetically susceptible individuals will get EOCRC first whenever a new environmental risk...